


Cube

by orphan_account



Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter/Funhaus RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe, Blood, F/M, GTA AU, Horror, M/M, Minor Violence, Multi, Science Fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-06
Updated: 2017-02-06
Packaged: 2018-09-22 08:49:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 31,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9597983
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Take care of this. You owe me.The note comes attached to a strange object left on their doorstep and, at first, it seems mostly harmless but, as anyone knows, looks can be horribly deceiving. It isn’t long before James and the rest of the crew find themselves on the run through the city, fighting, just trying to stay alive long enough to figure out exactly what the heck is going on and how in the world they can possibly stop it before they find themselves, quite literally, at a dead end.





	1. Cube.

**Author's Note:**

> I swear when I started this, I set out with the intention of just writing a straight-up GTA AU. No funny business, just a good ol’ tale of action and a heist gone wrong but it’s literally impossible for me to write a lengthy fic without making it weird so… you know. Instead of a GTA AU, it’s a horror sort of story with a sci-fi edge set in the GTA ‘Verse because I needed an excuse for them to a) all live together and b) have a lot of guns.
> 
> So. You know. Here it is. Weird Fic Town, Population: Me.

James Willems did not spend too much of his time thinking about a Higher Power.

He approached it in the same way that he did when it came to the idea of extraterrestrials roaming around out there somewhere in the never-ending galaxy: if they were out there, someone would eventually find them and the world as everyone knows it would drastically change. Until then, though, it wasn’t really his problem.

James wasn’t one of those people who refused to believe in something unless he could hold it in his hands, if he had _tangible proof_ then he would know it was true and that was it. What it really was was that James has always had a lot more in his life to worry about than whether or not someone—little and green or otherwise—was up above him, staring down.

Besides, there was a small part of him that wasn’t entirely sure that he enjoyed the idea that there was some divine figure with a million fingers that was making a marionette out of him on a daily basis and the longer he allowed himself to think about it, the itchier he got (he’d brought that up to Elyse once upon a time while they were sitting on the shitty third floor balcony, a plastic card table and empty bottles of orange soda between them and she’d laughed at him: _You’re allergic to God, James_ ) so he had built a brick wall around that particular thought, left a single hole so he could peek at it once a year, just to make sure how he still felt about it.

(The answer to that was: bad. He felt bad and itchy.)

There was no room for a higher power in James’ life. He wasn’t sure that he even truly believed in one but, as he lay bleeding out on the floor of the place he had grown to call ‘home’—the yellow glow of an early morning sun pouring through the high windows—and watched as four men surrounded him, the one who had shot him with his weapon still drawn, still pointed at him and he realized that somewhere along the line he had made a horrible mistake and dying was suddenly a decision that tasted like regret, he found himself hoping that something out there believed in _him_ at least because he could really use some help right about now.

He lifts a heavy arm, palm open towards the ceiling and waits for someone to pull the string.

 

— — —

 

_TWENTY-FOUR HOURS EARLIER_

 

There’s a phone ringing somewhere in the building and nobody is answering it. It’s been going in starts and stops for over half an hour and the only reason James knows that is because the shrill whine of it had woken him up and he’s since then spent the entire time with a pillow over his head, waiting for it to stop. He knows that simply crawling out from under the covers to take care of it would solve the problem but he also knows that he had ridden a shockwave backwards out of a convenience store window last night after Bruce decided that a grenade rolled underneath a safe was the easiest way to open it after the man behind the counter took one look at the situation he was in and chose to run and there was currently nothing ‘simple’ about getting himself out of bed.

( _You’re lucky he’s not bleeding internally_ , Adam had shouted at Bruce over the ringing in his ears as James lay down on the cramped rear-seat of the pick-up truck that Adam had stolen to get them home. Bruce was in the passenger seat beside Adam, gun in one hand and bouncing back and forth from marveling at how impressive the whole thing had looked ( _from, you know, an outside perspective_ ) to sincere apologies. James had groaned into Lawrence’s thighs from where he had no choice but to rest his head and Lawrence had half-heartedly started petting James’ hair in an attempt at comfort while he balanced a miniature laptop on James since he had nowhere else to put it, all of them listening to Adam say something about how _just once, could they please pull something like this off without blowing something up_.

Everything had been going pretty well up until that point and, for them, that counted as a success.)

So here he was, sore and a little bit sick, listening to someone attempting to get through to them at seven in the morning and nobody seemed inclined to do a damned thing about it. James moves the pillow, tosses it onto the empty space next to him, considers kicking the blankets off but changes his mind and turns onto his side and merely rolls himself off the mattress, hitting the floor with a muffled thud. There are three full clips, a crusty ziplock bag, a book without a cover, and a dust bunny the size of a grapefruit under the bed and he stares at them for a moment, wonders idly how any of those things could have possibly wound up where they had seemingly made their home, listens as the space around him falls suddenly silent.

He closes his eyes, breathes in through his nose, waiting, and maybe this was it, maybe it was over and, sure, he was on the floor now, but he’s slept in worse places before, another couple hours wouldn’t kill him. He’s already on the edges of finally drifting off again when the ringing starts up again. Palms pressed hard over his eyes, he pulls them back, blinks away the floaters and drags himself to his feet, takes a minute to rest a bare shoulder against the open doorway to his room (there had been a door there once but James had come back from an errand one afternoon to find it had disappeared; he never asked) before starting to trudge towards the stairs. Even if the others were still asleep or out doing their own thing, James knew for a fact that Lawrence was both here somewhere and wide awake.

(He didn’t leave the building unless absolutely necessary and rarely slept, not usually because of insomnia but because he had a tendency to hyper-focus on something, get so caught up that nearly everything (and, occasionally, _everyone_ ) else would almost cease to exist. Helpful on a heist occasionally but not so much outside of that.

 _Do you ever worry about him?_ Bruce had asked James one evening while they cleaned their guns, glanced to Lawrence sitting on their beat-up couch, his face lit by a too-bright screen. He said it quietly but it didn’t matter; Lawrence couldn’t hear them.

 _I worry about all of you_ , James had said at the same time an obnoxiously loud motorcycle tore past their building and he definitely hadn’t timed it that way but he was grateful for it all the same.

 _What_? Bruce asked and James shrugged, tossed a greasy cloth at him.

 _Nothing. Nevermind_ , James said when Bruce had pulled the cloth from his face. _He’s fine_.)

James makes his way to the wide open area that was downstairs, bare feet thudding heavily against the metal staircase and he stands at the bottom of it, hand still wrapped around the cold railing, realizes that even though he _expected_ to see Lawrence, it didn’t make watching him typing away at the wooden table with a stack of magazines under one leg, the surface pockmarked and scratched, while blatantly ignoring the desperate wail of the phone on the counter behind him any less infuriating.

( _There’s a whole set up in your room, Lawrence_ , Adam said to him once when he came downstairs and almost tripped over an extension cord, finding Lawrence on the couch, swimming in cables, two computers on his lap, _why do you keep dragging your ridiculous electronics down here_?

 _They’re not ridiculous,_ Lawrence had said, _and I don't know. I like it down here_.)

He moves across the concrete floor, passes by their weapons tables littered with guns and unlabeled explosives, moves past the door that led to their massive garage, shields his eyes as a ray of sunlight peeks through the newspaper-covered windows and stops a couple of feet across from Lawrence. James then lifts his arm, points at the phone, and waits. It doesn’t take nearly as long as James thought it would for Lawrence to notice him and he slowly lifts his head, frowns at the figure that had suddenly appeared in front of him, eyes trailing down James’ arm to the tip of his finger and then he turns in his chair, follows that same finger to where it’s forcing him to look.

“Oh,” Lawrence says after staring at the phone for a couple agonizingly long seconds, “Huh.”

“That’s all you can—” James opens his hand, gestures roughly at the device, “It’s been going for thirty minutes!”

“No shit,” Lawrence murmurs, leans his chair precariously back on two legs and grabs the phone, studies the screen before holding down a button on the side and the noise finally stops. James is about to ask him what he did before it hits him: _he turned it off_.

“That could have been important,” James says as Lawrence grunts, throws the phone with a flick of his wrist onto the table and it clunks down, slides a few inches.

“Eh,” Lawrence says, “Not likely.” James drops down onto a chair, glares briefly at the top half of Lawrence’s face, the rest hidden behind a screen, images and thin lines of text reflecting in his glasses and then folds his arms, rests his head on them, turns his attention to the edges of the now silenced phone. He doesn’t recognize it, now that he can actually see it; they cycled through so many burners over the course of a week, James wouldn’t be surprised if this was just one someone had forgotten to throw away. He’s still perturbed by the ceaselessness of the calls, doesn’t think he’s even dealt with a telemarketer (human or robot) that was quite that persistent but he loses his train of thought when it’s interrupted by Lawrence asking: “You okay?”

“Sure,” James says. “I just feel a lot like… Hmm, I don’t know. It sort of feels like I’ve been blown up sometime in the past few hours.” He doesn’t mean it to sound as angry as it comes out, knows that it wasn’t Lawrence’s fault but there’s a throbbing pain creeping up the back of his neck and he has to take out his frustration on _someone_. Lawrence is the only one here other than himself and punching himself in the chest isn’t going fix things this time (it rarely did, but sometimes it made him feel better about whatever situation they were in; he’s felt for awhile that it’s not exactly the most healthy way of responding to self-dissatisfaction, but it was also better than drinking until he blacked out so, in the grand scheme of things, he figures he could be doing a lot worse.)

“Mhm,” Lawrence hums and James figures that was it, he’d go back to what he was doing and James could decide if it was worth it to try and at least make it to the couch when he hears Lawrence’s chair pull along the floor, flickers his gaze without moving his head, watches Lawrence pick up a mug that he must have guessed was mostly clean and he hears the sputtering cough of running water. The thick ceramic is thudded down in front of him and Lawrence hovers for a second before sitting back down at his computer.

“Thanks. I’m sure this’ll make it all better,” James says, the words wrapped perfectly with a bow of sarcasm. He drinks from it anyway and it doesn’t help much but at least it’s something.

“It’s water or vodka,” Lawrence says. “We’re out of coffee.”

“How is it possible,” James asks, chooses to ignore for the moment that Lawrence seemed to think that coffee was going to fix everything and only settled for water because that was all they had, “That we can rake in thousands a week and yet we still live like this?” Lawrence shrugs. They certainly didn’t live in squalor but they weren’t hiding away in a hilltop mansion either. The furniture was ragged, liberated from sidewalks and from people who probably wouldn’t miss them, their fridge and cabinets almost always a few half-empty jars and an old can away from being completely empty. “Where is everyone?” James asks next, changes the subject.

“Uh… Bruce is still in bed, I think. Peake and Elyse left an hour ago.”

“Where?”

“They said something about food,” Lawrence says. “Probably. I’m not sure. I wasn’t really listening.” He mutters something that was meant only for himself, types, lets out an annoyed exhale through his nose. “Don’t know where Adam is.”

“Jesus Christ, Lawrence,” they hear Adam say from the small lounge area behind them and they look up and over simultaneously to see Adam sitting in one of the big chairs with a curved back, the stuffing lumpy, his feet propped up on the corner of the long, low table, resting in the space between empty liquor bottles and abandoned, water-stained plans. He’s turned the old television towards himself on it’s stand and it must have been on but there’s no sound coming from it. “I’m sitting _right here_. I’ve _been_ sitting right here since 6:30.”

“No you haven’t,” Lawrence says, sounds irritated and very slightly smug as if he’s already realized that Adam was toying with him and was calling him out immediately but James is positive that he wasn’t.

“I have,” Adam says, stands and, when he lifts his feet, his heel knocks a bottle from the table. He walks over and plants himself behind James, most likely with his arms crossed over his chest. “I came down, you were here, I said ‘good morning’ and you grunted at me.”

“Did I?” Lawrence asks, frowns and James can hear Adam let out a huff of frustrated breath. “Ah. Well.” He goes back to what he was doing, furrows his brow at something he reads, makes a soft _tsk_ noise and James is momentarily too preoccupied by the conversation and wondering how he could have missed Adam sitting there, too—eventually blaming it on tunnel vision—that it doesn’t hit him until after they’ve sat there in a brief stretch of silence:

“Why didn’t _you_ answer the phone?” James asks Adam, turns in his chair and winces as his muscles protest the movement. Adam comes around from where he’s standing and James swivels his body to follow him, stopping when Adam pulls out a chair at the table, leans back into it, legs stretched out and ankles crossed.

“Oh, right,” Adam says, “That. I don’t know. To be honest, I kind of tuned it out after the first few times it.” He reaches out an arm and swipes the phone from the table, looks it over, tries to turn the screen on with a quick button press but gets nothing but black in response. He throws it back down and it almost manages to skip like a flat rock on a lake before stuttering to a halt just at the edge of the table. Rubbing a hand over his face, he keeps one arm pulled across his chest, balances his elbow on the back of one hand, rests his head in the palm of the other. “How’re you doing?”

“You know,” James says, “I got stabbed four months ago and none of you guys asked me how I was doing then nearly as much as you have been since last night.”

“So… not good?” Adam asks.

“Oh no,” James says, “I’m great. Lawrence gave me water.” He tips the mug he’s still clutching towards Adam. “I feel like a new man.”

“I told you we don’t have coffee!” Lawrence says indignantly and James gives Adam a look, lets go of the mug to turn his hands palm-up towards the ceiling in a _can you believe this guy_ gesture.

“I still don’t understand why he thinks coffee instead of water is going to make a difference,” James says.

“They put caffeine in pain relievers all the time,” Lawrence says flippantly and Adam shrugs with one shoulder.

“He’s not wrong.”

“Thank you, Adam,” Lawrence says.

“That doesn’t help me _now_ does it, though?” James asks, puts his head back down on the table and sighs, closing his eyes. He shouldn’t have gotten out of bed. No matter how goddamn annoying that phone was, it wasn’t worth dragging himself down here. He’s been injured worse than this before—not _on his deathbed_ bad, but pretty gnarly by all accounts—but this was more rough on him than he expected.

It doesn’t take long for him to drift into that sort of inbetween state of being asleep but also awake, the world around him feeling like it had separated itself from his body and he existed in a place just a few feet outside of it. He’s heavy but floating and he’s aware of the other two making noise, having a muffled conversation, but it’s meaningless. Something makes a sudden _thunk_ and he starts just a bit, shoulders jumping, head lifting from the hard surface of the table just an inch or two, dazed. He thinks he hears Adam say _don’t worry about it_ and maybe he wasn’t talking to him but it doesn’t really matter, he listens to it anyway, drops his head again, folds his arm to rest his cheek on the back of his hand.

Someone laughs. A chair is moved back, scraping noisily against the hard floor. Something brushes along his shoulders. He wakes up just enough to hear Lawrence saying:

“—Sorry. I just thought he—” He doesn’t catch the rest of it. Everything is falling further and further away, dripping like watery paint down pitch black walls and, eventually, he’s completely out.

 

— — —

 

“Hey, guys!” Elyse shouts, her voice carrying remarkably well through the large open space around them and James sits bolt upright and immediately regrets it. He grumbles, rubs the hand he had been sleeping on over his face, feels something shift across his back and reaches over a shoulder to touch the soft fabric of someone’s sweatshirt that had been draped over him. He looks around, tries to get his bearings; Lawrence is still sitting across from him but his computer’s been closed, Bruce had apparently shown up while James was asleep and was stretched lengthwise on the couch, pulling his hands away from where they must have been folded behind his head. Adam’s meeting Elyse and Matt halfway, plastic bags digging into their forearms. He says something to her and she stops, stands on her toes and gestures at James.

“Sorry,” Matt says to James for her after he walks around Adam towards the kitchen, dumping his bags onto the counter, “We didn’t mean to wake you.”

“S’alright,” James says, glances to Lawrence. “How long was I—?”

“Less than an hour,” Lawrence says.

“Seriously?” It felt like a lot longer, as if he was going to wake up with a stiff neck and find it was already late afternoon. He’s not used to being this tired—it’s a different sort of tired, too, not the bone weariness of staying up too many hours or the sudden exhausted comedown after a lengthy surge of adrenaline and he’s almost ready to accuse one of them of drugging him but he’s interrupted by Bruce asking:

“Elyse, what the hell is _that?_ ”

“No fucking clue,” Elyse is saying as she and Adam join the others in the kitchen, Bruce launching himself off the couch to wander over to the chair that Adam had been sitting in earlier and Elyse places a box on the center of the table. It’s sleek, has a shine to it and, at first, it looks completely black but when James sits up, lets the surface catch light from a different angle, he can see that it’s actually a dark purplish-blue. It’s just small enough that someone could balance it on the palm of one hand. If you stuck a crank in the side, you could almost make it look like a vaguely threatening jack-in-the-box. “I figured Lawrence just ordered some weird Japanese thing again.” Lawrence looks as if he was going to start to say something but Elyse talks over him. “I _thought_ that but then Peake found this taped to the bottom.” She reaches into her back pocket, pulls out a crisp, white envelope, flips open the back with her thumb and takes out a small piece of paper, lays it on the table, smooths out the edges and they all lean in.

“‘Take care of this for me’,” James reads the neatly printed words written in red permanent marker, “‘You owe me’?” It wasn’t signed as if the person who had written the note thought that they would know who it was from by handwriting alone or, maybe, they just didn’t care. James sits back, taps his index finger on the pad of his thumb as he thinks; they did a lot of work for other people once upon a time—and still did on occasion if they really needed to—but nearly every single one of those ties had been cut, bridges burned to charcoal and he couldn’t come up with a clear name of someone who would want any of them to do him any favors.

“You think it could be a, you know…” Adam says, cups both hands, touches his fingertips together and then brings the hands apart, making a soft exploding sound and Bruce picks the box up, holds it to his ear and then shrugs, puts it carefully back down.

“I don’t hear anything going on in there,” Bruce says. “It’s really light though, look,” He picks it up again, lifts it and lowers it a couple times in his hand, holds it out to the others but nobody will take it from him right away until, finally, Lawrence grabs it, gives it a shake and everyone shouts, holds out their hands or backs away but nothing happens.

“I think if it was a bomb we’d already be dead,” Lawrence says, runs a thumb around the side near the top and then closer to the bottom, grimaces, brings it to his face to squint at the surface. “There’s no seam. I don’t see how to open it.”

“What kind of box doesn’t open?” Bruce asks. “Is a box still a box if you can’t open it?”

“It’s too early to be asking those kinds of questions,” James says.

“It’s almost nine,” Elyse says and there’s a furrow in her brow, must see something when she stares at him and she mouths:  _you okay?_ at him and he shrugs, but doesn’t answer her silent question.

“Like I said: Too early.”

“A box you can’t open is just a cube,” Matt says, hands in his pockets, making it clear that he doesn’t even want the temptation of putting his fingers anywhere near it.

“So, to summarize: a stranger leaves a cube on our doorstep, tells us to watch it and we’re _not_ immediately throwing it away?” Adam asks, looks to each of them and they all stare back before glancing at one another, saying nothing. “Look, if we have to vote on this then we’ll vote.” He raises a hand. “I say we get rid of it. Whatever it is, I don’t want it.”

“I’m with Adam on this one, guys,” Peake says, tugs a hand out of a pocket, raises it too.

“We’re keeping it,” Lawrence says, finally puts the box— _cube_ , James corrects himself—back down, lifts a hand above his head.

“We don’t all have to—” Adam starts to say but Bruce interrupts him, lifts his elbow from the table, hand up, level with his head.

“Keep it,” he says, nods once at Lawrence and then everyone is staring at James and Elyse who share another brief, wordless exchange before Elyse lifts her shoulders and raises a hand, tilting it slightly.

“Ditch it,” she says and then it’s all up to James. He knows they’re all watching him but he focuses on the cube instead, reaches for it with both hands, turns it counter-clockwise three times, curls his fingers in on his right hand and knocks lightly on the side, moves his head to the side just a bit and listens, hits it again. It sounds hollow as if there’s nothing but air trapped inside but he doesn’t understand the purpose of having something that can’t be conventionally opened be empty.

“I don’t like it,” he says eventually and both Bruce and Lawrence deflate, just a bit and then James sees Bruce shrug, say without actually making any sound 'sorry'  at Lawrence, as if he had backed him up simply because he knew nobody else would be on his side on this one. Lawrence frowns at him before addressing the room.

“You seriously aren’t curious? Not even a little bit? I mean, come on, guys. Give me an hour and I could probably figure it out. I could at least get it open, see what’s going on in there.” He leans closer to it, closes one eye and narrows the other, studying it but he makes a noise when Adam swipes it away from his face, nearly hitting him in the nose.

“We voted,” Adam says and walks past Lawrence to a spot just beside their fridge, drops it into the black bag-lined trash can with a heavy thud and then twists the pieces around the opening of the bag, curls it around a fist, pulls it free and takes it back towards the door that Elyse and Matt had come through moments before.

“That’s a bit excessive,” Lawrence mumbles, watching him leave. The note that had come with the cube has been left behind, still smoothed out on the table and James picks it up between two fingers, looks it over, front to back, but there’s nothing particularly irregular or menacing about it. He knows he should chase after Adam, make sure that it winds up on a landfill somewhere along with the thing it had been attached to but he pockets it instead, checks around the circle of his friends but Matt is the only one who notices and, although he gives James a look, he doesn’t say anything.

“Check it,” Elyse is saying now, all of them (except, perhaps, for Lawrence, who still looked annoyed) having already pushed the whole incident out of their minds. She pulls out a large container from one of the bags she and Matt had carried inside and it turns out to be instant coffee.

“Really?” James complains, gestures at it with an open hand. “Instant, Elyse?”

“Hey!” She says, shakes it at him, the pulverized beans sounding like an over-sized maraca, “This is good stuff, alright?”

“No,” Lawrence says, “ _Kopi Luwak_ is ‘good stuff’. Instant is tolerable. At best,” he adds. “Barely.”

“Well,” Elyse says, clutches the plastic container close to her chest and then moves it off to the side away from them as if she’s preparing to walk away, “I guess I’ll just take it back, then. No coffee for anyone. See ya’.” She actually turns, goes to follow Adam, stops when Bruce says:

“Wait! No, no. Don’t listen to him. I like instant. Good.”

“‘I like instant. Good.’?” James laughs when Elyse swings back towards the table after they’ve taken a moment to let the words sink in, her mouth forced into a down-turn, doing an awful job of hiding a smile. Bruce makes a face of utter resignation, knowing immediately that none of them were going to let him live that one down any time soon and Matt has to stand on his toes to reach the cabinet with the mugs until Lawrence steps beside him to pull five down, since James already had one that had somehow mysteriously gone from being clutched in his tired hands to on the counter beside the sink, which Matt uses to fill a dented pot with water.

 

— — —

 

They actually have the day to themselves, nothing planned, no jobs on their very loose schedule and, by late afternoon, someone has already scribbled the words ‘I LIKE INSTANT. GOOD.’ in a thick black pen on a scrap of paper and taped it to their container of coffee. James tries to decipher the handwriting, narrows it down to either Lawrence or Elyse but can’t pinpoint it exactly, momentarily finds himself disgruntled at himself that he can’t tell by now but he lets it go.

He spends most of the day on the couch and hates it but everything still hurts and he’s tired, so goddamn tired and the others come and go, mill around except for Lawrence who sits on the couch with him, busy, typing like he’s going to die in the morning and if he doesn’t finish what he’s working on by then, his ghost would spend eternity hating itself as much as he did when he was alive (James figured that Lawrence thought he hid it well but James knew; he wasn’t sure if the others did) and Elyse, who sat in a chair and kept the television on, put it on a movie channel they got from stolen cable (she didn’t really watch any of them all the way through, kept getting up during what she must have assumed were the boring parts, wandering off somewhere only to return and consistently ask _what’s he doing that for?_ ).

James is fully aware that they were keeping an eye on him, considers joking about them drawing the short straw but keeps it to himself, knows that they’re just doing what they think is right for him and, really, he does appreciate it, even though he won’t verbalize that, exactly the same way they won’t verbalize their obvious concern other than to ask how he’s doing.

That’s just the way they’ve always worked: feelings weren’t discussed, they were just understood.

James dozes on and off and right about the same time that he notices the new, mocking label taped to their coffee, he hears Adam say:

“Lawrence, come on. We agreed to throw this out.” James looks—as do the others, and Adam says it loud enough that he draws Matt down from upstairs and he hesitates on the staircase, leaning against the railing just enough to be able to see what’s going on—and sees Adam standing by the front door, holding the cube in his hands. Lawrence frowns at him from his spot on the couch.

“What’re you talking about?” He asks and, immediately, James can tell he’s sincere. “I haven’t moved all afternoon.”

“It’s true,” Elyse says. “I mean, I’ve been back and forth but not long enough for him to bring that thing back.”

“Besides,” Lawrence says, “if I had, you really think I’d just leave it there? Trust me, you never would have known unless someone ratted me out.”

“Bruce…?” Adam asks, faces Bruce who had been cleaning out his .44 Magnum and he puts up his hands, shakes his head only once. “So you’re telling me that nobody knows how this got from the dumpster to _inside_ by the front door?” Nobody responds and it’s clear that he thinks someone is simply refusing to admit what they had done, seemingly ignoring the fact that Lawrence was right: if he—or someone else—had gone out of their way to bring it back, there was no reason to leave it where Adam found it unless they _wanted_ him to find it there which, really, didn’t make a whole lot of sense. “Unbelievable. I’m throwing this out,” he says before going outside with it, “ _Again_.” Lawrence must feel James staring at him because the first thing he says when he looks over to him is:

“I swear I didn’t.”

“Okay,” James says because he hadn’t accused him of anything, he was just looking but he’s blocked by Elyse throwing herself in between them on the couch, sits on James’ stretched out legs and then leans back to wedge behind them, hangs her own legs over his.

“Did you really not?” She asks Lawrence. “I was just standing up for ya’ buddy.”

“I appreciate it,” Lawrence says and sounds as if he actually means it, “But I really didn’t. I’ve been sitting here working, listening to your horrible movies and James snoring all afternoon.”

“They’re not horrible!” Elyse exclaims at the same time James protests: “I _do not_ snore.” And then James says: “You don’t have to be here, you know.”

“Yeah, well…” Lawrence says, trails off, finishes with a shrug of one shoulder. Adam disappears for almost fifteen minutes and, when he returns, his face is slightly flushed as if he had been walking quickly in the dry heat and Bruce is the one to ask him what took so long, a question that got him a glare first, an actual answer second.

“Found a dumpster behind the Chinese place,” he says, goes towards the kitchen and starts washing his hands.

“That’s two block away,” Matt says from where he’s now sitting on the stairs.

“Exactly. So if anybody wants it—” Adam says, glances pointedly at Lawrence and then, very subtly, towards Bruce as if he still didn’t believe that neither of them were responsible for that thing reappearing in their building, “—Then they’ll have to dig for it.”

“Bit extreme, don’t you think?” James asks, reiterates Lawrence’s sentiment from the first time Adam had thrown the cube away but Adam just grunts in response, digs underneath his index fingernail with his thumb and grimaces.

 

— — —

 

They’re in the kitchen much later that night, eating from the same place that Adam had buried the Cube of Unknown Origins (Lawrence comes up with it, Elyse and Bruce spend at least a minute standing around shouting ‘CU-OOOOHHH’ at each other like parrots who are just _asking_ for their owners to ring their necks) and James is poking at a piece of steamed broccoli, watching as Bruce reaches across the table to take a shrimp from Adam’s plate while he was bent over, searching for something in the paper bag the restaurant forgot when he hears a thud from the other side of the room.

He hesitates, narrows his eyes before turning and then lifts his arm cautiously, points, opens his mouth, considers what he’s seeing, and then tries again to speak.

“Uh, guys?” Nobody responds, too lost in their food or boisterous conversations so he raises his voice, repeats himself. “Guys.” He’s still pointing and slowly, one by one, the noise dies down, heads spin and James hears someone drop their fork, another person say, just barely audibly: _what the fuck_.

The cube is sitting inside where Adam had found it the second time that afternoon, right by the front door. The sound hadn’t come from the door itself opening and closing (it was easily recognizable, at least it was to James, who had trained himself to become familiar with it just in case someone who didn’t belong tried to come in or for those nights where they were off doing their own thing and one of them hadn’t come home yet, he’d be able to hear it when they did) but of the cube itself hitting the floor as if it had snapped into existence a few feet in the air and dropped.

“I told you,” Lawrence is saying, “I told you I didn’t do it.”

“I don’t think whether or not you did or did not do it is the real issue here, Lawrence,” Adam says.

“I know,” Lawrence says. “I just wanted to make that clear is all. I don’t like it when people accuse me of something I didn’t do.”

“Well, congrats,” Adam says, “You’re right. I was an asshole. You win.”

“It’s not about winning!” Lawrence exclaims and James doesn’t have to be looking at him to be able to see him throwing his hands in the air.

“It’s always about winning with you!” Adam argues and James is about to steer them back on track because he was pretty sure there was something far more important going on that needed their attention far more than having this disagreement for a tenth time but Matt, of all people, beats him to it in his own sort of gentle way.

“Come on, guys, I really don’t think this is the time.” Which was, as far as James was concerned, the nicest way he could possibly tell them to _shut the fuck up_ and they actually do, either because Matt was the one who said it or maybe because they realized that oh, yeah, there was a mysterious, sort-of-black cube in their home that wouldn’t leave them alone.

“Where did it—?” Elyse starts to ask, stops. “How did it—?” She can’t finish her questions but she doesn’t need to; everyone was most likely thinking the exact same thing. “It couldn’t have.”

“It did,” James says, surprising even himself by how quickly he was willing to believe the absurdity that an inanimate object could somehow move from Point A to Point B without, seemingly, any human interference. Did it slide down the sidewalk and slip inside? It couldn’t, not without opening the door. There were no windows close enough to where it was sitting and only one of them wasn’t painted over or nailed shut and that one was right behind where Adam was sitting at the table; he’d like to think that one of them would have noticed something like that opening a window and dropping through the cracks before sliding over the floor. That, of course, narrowed it down to the idea that it did just as it had sounded: it appeared out of thin air, forming like a popped bubble put in reverse and simply plopped itself down on the ground.

James takes the note he still had out of his pocket from where he had stuffed it that morning, looks it over again but there’s nothing new, nothing that anybody had missed, the letters not written strangely, no sign of a hidden code that one of them would have to work to decipher, as if the person who wrote it had been forced into cordiality but wanted to find a way to warn them of what he was getting them into. Instead, it was just a message from a stranger who seemed to know them, demanding they take this off his hands. As a last resort he sniffs it, gets a hint of cigarette smoke, but he’s not sure if that’s just the fault of the environment he was in or from the person who had written the note. The whole time he was doing this there were murmurs of discussions but nobody had yet to make a move to actually go over to the door and _do something_ about their friendly Cube of Unknown Origins.

Matt is finally the one to go retrieve it, the sleeves of his sweatshirt over his hands as if he was still reluctant to actually touch it and he uses the base of the cube to clear aside empty and nearly-full containers of slowly chilling food, places it gently in the center of the table and James doesn’t miss how everyone still seated pushes their chairs back, just a couple inches away from it (he doesn’t miss it because he does it, too). They all stare at it in silence for a moment as if they’re expecting it to do something or, god forbid, start _talking_ to them but nothing happens.

“So nobody’s actually _seen_ it come back yet, right?” Adam asks.

“I heard it,” James says, “But no. I didn’t _see_ it. There was a thud and then I turned and, well...” He gestures at it.

“What’re you thinking, Adam?” Bruce asks.

“We put it outside, doesn’t matter where, wait in here, watch the door. We either catch someone putting it there or we watch as an inanimate object delivers itself to our doorstep.” James can hear in Adam’s voice how ridiculous he knows that sounds but he puts it out there anyway, as a possibility, maybe. An unlikely one in his eyes, but a possibility all the same. “One way or another we get an answer.”

“I’ll do it,” Lawrence offers immediately, lifts his hands slightly, palms up towards the ceiling when everyone turns to look at him. “What? As amazing as something like it appearing out of nowhere is, there’s no point in everyone sitting around. I can set up my phone, record it. I’ll be awake anyway.” James narrows his eyes, frowns at him and he should probably hate that Lawrence notices and understands what that facial shift is trying to say, but he doesn’t. “It’s fine,” he says directly to James and no one else, just making the point clear that he was answering his wordless question. There were, like James had said before, nights when Lawrence didn’t sleep because he was working and then there were others where he stayed up, couldn’t sleep for other reasons entirely and those were the times James was the most concerned about. Lawrence twirls cold lo mein on his fork and eats it, as if he wanted James to know that, really, it was fine, just like he said.

It’s just barely after midnight (the place they ordered from was the only local restaurant that still delivered then, although James had started to wonder if they really _weren’t_ open and just did it because they were a little bit frightened by having these loud, slightly dangerous people in their neighborhood and figured it was easier just to do as they said and not fight them) and, while the others clean up, Adam picks up the cube with the tips of his fingers and, for a third time, carries it back outside.

He doesn’t tell them where he put it this time, as if that was part of the test, like there was a piece of him that still didn’t quite believe that somehow one of them wasn’t responsible and that by not revealing the location, he would stop them from going back out there to get it. James wants to ask him how in the world he thought anyone at that kitchen table could have done that without having superhuman speed or the ability to freeze time but one look at the naked frustration on his face and he decides it’s not worth it.

James is the last one to go upstairs and he hesitates at the bottom of the staircase, gazes at Lawrence who is already propped up at an angle on the couch, facing the door and Lawrence must feel him there because he looks up from his phone.

“You’ll wake us up if something happens, right?” James asks, fishes the question out of the ocean of other things he wanted to say instead.

“Absolutely,” Lawrence says, and the light from his phone shifts colors, giving his face a faint red glow. He smiles and there’s a strangeness about it that leaves James feeling as if there’s something Lawrence isn’t saying either but his muscles are starting to throb and twinge, he’s not in the mood to do this weird dance with him tonight, so he just goes to bed, leaves behind the sound of fingers tapping on an electronic keyboard.

 

— — —

 

The room is as dark as a room without a door can be and James is just getting settled, surprised that, after all the snoozing he had done that day and everything else going on, he was finding it remarkably easy to close his eyes when there’s a shadow falling over him, hiding the dim light that spilled in from the outside hallway and Elyse knocks lightly on the doorway. He can see her hair is pulled up and he can’t help it, stares at her shoulders and then her neck and finally flicks his eyes to her shrouded face.

“What’s up?” He keeps his voice to a whisper, even though he knows it wouldn’t really matter how loudly he spoke.

“Can I sleep in here with you tonight?” Elyse asks. “This whole thing has me on edge.”

“Yeah,” James says easily, doesn’t spare the request a second thought, scoots backwards to give her room and lifts the comforter he’d finally picked up off the floor from where he had rolled himself in it that morning. She pads over to him, to the bed, and climbs in, under the covers and waits for the blanket to be over her before she puts her head down. She’s turned away from him but that didn’t mean anything and she shifts, James feeling the bottoms of her feet pushing against his shins.

“This is weird,” she says and it takes James a second longer than it really should have by now to realize she’s talking about the cube and not where she was (this wasn’t the first time they’ve shared a bed like this and James was sure it wouldn’t be the last; whenever she was nervous or wasn’t feeling well, she somehow found her way here). “This is all too weird.” James reaches up to pull on a lock of hair that had fallen from her loose bun.

“I know,” he says, and leaves it at that.

 

— — —

 

At first, James isn’t sure what it was that woke him, had him fast asleep one second and wide awake the next but it doesn’t take long for his addled brain to shout:  _gunshot_. Elyse heard it too, is lifting her head from the pillow but she’s reacting slower and she yelps when James launches himself over her, bumps her shoulder with his elbow. He’s aware of the others getting up but he’s the first one moving, takes two steps at a time and comes to a halt at the bottom of the stairs, sees Lawrence standing a few feet from the open door with a still-smoking handgun clutched in a white-knuckle grip, the body of a man dressed in black lying face-first in front of him, the cube on the floor between them.

There are other feet on the stairs behind him but James doesn’t check to see who it is, runs over to Lawrence and steps in front of him, ignores the dead body to put a hand on each of Lawrence’s upper arms, stares at him, checks him over. He’s splattered with wet blood—mostly on the front of his shirt, a few small flecks on his cheek and spattered on his mouth—but, otherwise, he doesn’t appear to be injured and James lets out the breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.

“What happened?” James asks, keeps his grip on Lawrence’s arms and the others are gathering around, looking either at the body or the cube or Lawrence, who blinks a couple times before speaking. It’s not as if he hadn’t shot anyone before, it was old hat to all of them by now, but he’s acting as if this was the first time he’d ever pulled a trigger. _He must have surprised him_ , James figures. He never did handle surprises very well. None of them enjoyed surprises, really, except maybe for Bruce.

“I— I was sitting on the couch and about two hours after you all went upstairs I saw— It just—” He closes his eyes, takes in a slow inhale, exhale through his nose before opening his eyes again, keeps his focus solely on James. “The cube just—” He snaps his fingers sloppily on the hand not still holding the gun. “I left it there, just wanted to see if something else would happen. I mean, it hadn’t yet but you never know but— Ten minutes later, there’s a knock on the door. I don’t know why I— When I opened it he was—” He gestures to the body. “He didn’t say anything. Nothing. He just pulled a gun. I was lucky I had one with me or else— He nearly did.” If he hadn’t brought the gun, Lawrence means, he’d be dead. He might have been dead anyway if someone who took just a couple seconds longer to process a situation and react had been standing there.

Bruce is coming up behind Lawrence and he jumps at the movement he sees just out of the corner of his eye but Bruce is simply reaching over to take the gun away and Lawrence lets him. James finally drops his hands away to turn his attention to the corpse, an impressive pool of blood slowly creeping out from under his chest.

“I think we should probably—” Adam starts, indicates to the open door and the man’s legs sticking out, lit orange by a nearby streetlamp.

“Right,” Matt says, grabs one arm while Adam takes the other and James and Lawrence step aside, watch as they drag the body further into the large room, leaving a thick smear of blood as it moves like a grotesque slug and Elyse leans into the door to close it. “Are you sure he didn’t say anything?” He asks Lawrence, who runs fingers through his hair.

“I swear. It was like— It was like he was staring _through_ me. Like I was just an _obstacle_.”

Adam is tugging at the body, flips him over onto his back and they crowd around, peer down at him. There’s a small hole, center mass, where Lawrence had nailed him from close range, red blossoming on a white button-up shirt, soaking his black tie. His face is bruised, nose twisted from where he had landed on it and he must have been dead before he even hit the ground because he clearly hadn’t done a thing to stop himself from falling. The sunglasses he was wearing were lopsided and cracked and James frowns. What kind of person wears shades at three in the morning?

Hands are going through his pockets but they come up empty. A generic suit, a boring haircut and not even an old receipt from a gas station crumpled somewhere in the bottom of his shoe to tell them where he might have been before he showed up here.

“This can’t be a coincidence,” Bruce says, mostly to himself but then, to the others: “This can’t be a coincidence, right?”

“But if he has to do with, you know, that thing,” Elyse says, signals over her shoulder with her thumb towards the temporarily abandoned cube, “Why didn’t he show up earlier? This is the third time it’s popped back here.”

“I don’t know,” Bruce says. “I didn’t say I _knew_ — But I mean, come on. Ten minutes apart? A few hours later or tomorrow afternoon, I’d figure we just pissed someone off and they were here for revenge but _ten minutes_?”

“Fair enough,” Elyse says, conceding, and then pokes at the body with her toes. “What’re we going to do with this?”

“We dump him,” Adam says plainly and they’re already starting to move, to take care of it without discussion because they’d done this enough times before to not need to make a whole performance out of it when they freeze at the sound of someone knocking on the door. They all look at one another, wait it out and it stops for twenty seconds before the knocking continues. It doesn’t change, doesn’t get louder or more persistent but there’s no more pauses either and Bruce steps forward, checks the gun to make sure Lawrence hadn’t grabbed one that simply had one bullet left carelessly in the chamber and then moves with all the confidence of someone who knows that, if there was trouble, he’d be the one walking away from it.

There’s a man in an identical suit and pair of sunglasses on their doorstep and James sees him reach under his jacket to pull out a Desert Eagle and he shouts out Bruce’s name, isn’t sure why because the guy would have to be blind to miss that and the bang echoes around them, the man in the suit crumpling to the floor.

“What the _fuck_ ,” Lawrence is saying, “What the _fuck_.”

“Holy shit,” Bruce says, turns to the others, "Lawrence wasn’t kidding about—” But he doesn’t get to finish, Adam’s turn to call out to him and James is impressed that he managed to see the figure before everyone else because, by the time _he_ would have noticed it might have been too late. The suited man is rushing forward, leaning into his sprint with a stiff back and mechanical arms, the same gun the other two had coming loose from a holster and Bruce spins, sets off another shot and the man stops suddenly, looks down at the new hole in his chest and then drops. He doesn’t wait to see if there are more coming, kicks and pushes the second man out to the sidewalk and then slams the door shut, securing it with all three locks and then pressing his back against it, startling when there’s knocking from the other side, walks quickly over to join the others again.

“How many of them _are_ there?!” Elyse asks.

“I don’t know,” James says, “And I really don’t want to find out.” He pauses, just for the briefest of moments. “We have to get out of here.” Running away isn’t something they did very often, especially if they were being assaulted on their own turf, but he’s got this feeling rumbling somewhere low in his gut that’s telling him there’s something horribly _wrong_ about all of this and it wasn’t going to be solved by gunfire.

“And go where?” Adam asks him and James knows he’s right. They know this whole city fairly well but this is the only property they own and they don’t really have any other friends—there are a few people that might not try and kill them the second they show their faces at their front door but, even then, James isn’t so sure. Even so, being _here_ isn’t ideal, either.

“Does it matter?” James returns Adam’s query with one of his own. The knocking is still coming, a curled fist against metal, and James doesn’t blame Lawrence for answering it earlier; even though he now knows who’s standing on the other side, there’s something eerily non-threatening about the sound, like it was just a neighbor dropping by to ask if they could borrow a piece of lawn equipment.

“We don’t have to go anywhere,” Bruce argues. “Small army or not, I think we can take them.”

“Listen,” James says, “You know I’m not a ‘I’ve got a bad feeling about this’ kind of guy but I’ve got a fucking bad feeling about this one. Live to fight another day...” He starts, waits for Bruce to finish:

“...And then we blow them all away.” It’s a stupid phrase, James knows—he can’t even remember which one of them came up with it—but he only pulls it out when they’re in a situation just like this one: things are too weird, something isn’t right, they’re overwhelmed and he needs Bruce to understand, to hear him. _Retreat and we’ll be alive to kill them all later_. Bruce puts a hand on James’ arm for a moment, nods once.

“We can go to Crown’s,” Matt offers. The Crown was where they brought all their vehicles, whether it was for a tune-up after someone swerves too hard into the median while trying to outrun the police or to completely gut and remodel a car that they didn’t want the original owners to have a fair chance at finding again. It was open twenty-four/seven and, normally, during the day, it was packed and noisy but, at this time in the strange hours where you aren’t sure if it makes more sense to call it night or early morning, it’d be empty other than Cyneburg, the oddly named mechanic who had to sit around for the nightshift, just in case some idiot came clunking and coughing up to the heavy garage door.

These people—whoever they were—may have been able to find them here, but almost anybody could find them here if they really wanted to. No one made this place particularly secret—the fact that none of them had been arrested or buried six feet under in a shallow grave was due to the right amount of money exchanging hands and a lot of dumb, stupid luck. The Crown—despite being what it was and the cacophony it made on even the slowest of days—was difficult to simply stumble upon; you had to know it _existed_ to even be able to start looking for it. ( _It’s like it exists but it also doesn’t exist_ , Lawrence had said to James one drunken evening. _It’s like we’re here_ , and he put one hand, palm down, flat in the air, _everything else is here_ , put his other hand quite a few inches above the bottom one, _and The Crown is_ — he paused, realized he only had two hands and then reached over to take one of James’, put it to mimic his own before placing them where they had been before, above and below, James’ in the middle, — _The Crown is here. Get it?_ James did, sort of, but he pretended he didn’t because he enjoyed seeing Lawrence get himself all worked up trying to explain something he feels like he should already understand to him.)

“I say we go. Call it a ‘strategic exit’ if it makes you feel better,” James says, waits for Adam or someone else to request another vote but nobody argues and, just as they had started to move when getting ready to dispose of the first body, they spring into action, Bruce and Matt collecting duffel bags to fill with weapons, Adam going to check all the other windows and places someone may be able to wriggle inside, Elyse running back upstairs to change into some real clothes and James is left standing, knows he should be doing something and decides on going over to step around the pool of blood and collect the cube, then going over to where Lawrence is packing up his computer, winding the cord around his arm into a loop. He notices what James is holding but doesn’t say anything about it, sighs instead. “You should change your shirt.” Lawrence looks down at himself and frowns.

“I don’t think there’s time,” he says.

“Sure there is,” James says. “I don’t think these guys know how to open doors.” There’s no scraping noise of a lockpick, no thuds of shoulders or bottoms of shoes trying to kick it down; just _knock, knock, knock_. James understood, though—none of that made the situation seem any less urgent. Three intruders had been shot within an incredibly short amount of time and there were more out there, waiting, hoping that someone was stupid enough to invite them in.

“Yeah, okay,” Lawrence says after a moment of consideration. “Sure.” He puts his computer down, walks quickly up the same way that Elyse had gone, nearly runs into her as she’s coming back down, a backpack slung over one shoulder, the contents heavy, the bottom sagging under the weight and he can tell by the lumpiness of it what she had stuffed inside.

“Christ, Elyse,” James says when she comes over towards him, “Did you put _every_ grenade you own in there?”

“Yes, actually,” she says, pulls it from her body and unzips the bag, shows him the inside. “Your’s too. I’m not taking any chances.” When she tugs the zipper closed and hoists it back over where it had been hanging, James sees something dangling from an old, thin chain around her neck, glinting in the low light and he immediately knows what it is.

“You’re wearing it,” he says and she looks down, picks up the chain with her thumb and index finger, pulls it up and runs the pad of her thumb around the bumped ridges of the bottlecap. It’s from the night on the unstable balcony of James’ first apartment where they had drank lukewarm orange soda and James had told Elyse that he wanted her to be the first official member of his crew. _I’m keeping this_ , she had said, _so I never forget when you said that_. He hadn’t thought it was that big of a deal at first but it had meant a lot to her and, eventually, it did to him, too, found himself thinking that maybe him telling her that was his way of saying something else and she figured it out long before he did. She wore it a lot for awhile but then stopped, not because feelings had changed but because she was afraid she’d lose it once they started getting into more dangerous work. The fact that she was wearing it now meant—to him at least—that she thought there was a decent chance they may not ever come back here again.

“Yeah. We could use the luck,” she says, tucks it under the collar of her shirt, hidden from any other curious glances. Lawrence comes back down with a bag of his own and James is starting to wonder what it says about him that he can’t think of anything he’d be leaving behind that he’d miss or desperately need and he looks down at the cube still clutched in his hands, the one that everyone must see him holding but nobody is willing to openly address or challenge him on. Maybe they all understand the same thing that James does: leaving it behind won’t make a difference, won’t matter if it’ll just keep following them around. At least bringing it with them will save time having to sit on their hands, waiting for it to show when they arrive at The Crown. Besides, there were plenty of tools there that could be used to easily slice this thing open, to see if the inside was really as empty as it sounded.

“Here,” Lawrence is saying to James and he lifts his head to see Lawrence holding out the gun that James kept in the bottom of his underwear drawer and he takes it, tucks it into the back of his pants.

“You went rifling through my drawers?” James asks. He’s not really all that upset, he’s just more curious as to why Lawrence would do it at all, why he would think of it between cleaning blood off himself and packing up his things.

“I know you like that one,” Lawrence says. James does. It was his first real gun, stolen off the body of a drug dealer he’d accidentally killed in a poor attempt to raid his safe. He’d taken it because his prints were all over it but wound up keeping it because he liked how it had been modified. He was pretty sure it was the only one of it’s kind and he enjoyed that feeling, being the only one with a black 9mm with a possibly real gold handle and a slick reload.

He really wants to know why there were two people now who seemed to be under the impression that this place that they’d called home for three years now would have to be burned (or maybe they didn’t; maybe James was reading too much into their body language) but he’s distracted, a couple flecks of blood still on Lawrence’s mouth from where he had missed them when he washed off his face. Without thinking, he lifts his hand towards him, uses his thumb to wipe the blood away, can feel Lawrence’s warm breath on his skin and Lawrence’s eyes seem to widen, his lips parting just slightly and his face is flushed pink when James pulls away.

“Missed a spot,” James says.

“O—okay,” Lawrence manages to say and Elyse smiles from behind him, rolls her eyes, shaking her head at the both of them for, invariably, different reasons. The moment is interrupted by Adam shouting at them from the door leading out to the garage:

“Are we getting out of here or what?”

 

— — —

 

They decide to take the van, the only vehicle in there that belongs to them and solely them—not someone who’s letting them borrow it, not a piece stuck in a state between being stolen and bought where they _could_ drive it if they wanted but couldn’t damage it or get too attached because, ultimately, it would be gone in a few days—and Adam doesn’t ask to drive but somehow he’s behind the wheel, Matt in the passenger seat beside him, the other four filling up the windowless spaces in the back. The bench seats are hard and there aren’t any seatbelts, low shelves above their heads to store equipment that they currently didn’t have the only things to clutch onto to steady themselves. It wasn’t particularly comfortable but it hadn’t been designed for comfort, it had been put together for when they needed a place to hide, to watch and for Lawrence to do his thing during a heist that didn’t require a particularly speedy getaway or all hands on deck and armed to the teeth.

When the thick, heavy door between them and the street whines open, Adam is ready to go but hesitates because there, on the sidewalk, are two more men in suits lying in wait, as if they had known what they were lingering in front of but not how to get through it on their own, figuring that, at some point, it had to open and they’d be there when it did.

“What is it?” Elyse asks but Adam doesn’t respond so she tries again. “What’s the matter?” He points and they all stand up, backs hunched against the low ceiling and huddle behind the two front seats. The men almost seem confused, as if they weren’t expecting to see a vehicle in front of them and weren’t sure what their next course of action was and James swears he can see one of them shrug before they both draw their weapons.

“Adam!” Bruce says his name, doesn’t yell it, uses a tone as if he can’t believe that this is something that Adam honestly has to _think about_ and so Adam slams his foot on the gas, the tires squealing, coughing up smoke before the van finally launches forward and runs the two men down. They hit the hood with a sickening thud, their bodies disappearing under the carriage and none of them look back as Adam takes a right and starts to drive them quickly down the surprisingly quiet street.

 

— — —

 

It takes twenty minutes to get to The Crown and, during the entire ride, nobody says much of anything. There are a couple muttered discussions, a few one or two word questions or reassurances but, other than that, it’s radio silence and James doesn’t exactly blame them. It’s not the violence itself that’s bothering him—and, maybe everyone else—but the circumstances surrounding it. Usually, if someone had to die, it was all part of the plan; whether it was Plan B or Plan Y was a different matter entirely, but either way, someone would know it was coming.

“You alright?” James hears Bruce ask and it takes him a second to realize that he’s talking to _him_ and he looks up to where he’s sitting, forces a smile.

“Me? I’m not the one who’s killed someone tonight.” He glances at the bits of blood still on Bruce’s shirt that he hadn’t seemed to notice or maybe just didn’t care about and then looks to Lawrence who was staring at a spot on the slightly rusted wall just above Elyse’s head.

“So?” Bruce is asking. “It’s been a weird fucking few hours.”

“No kidding,” James says, spins the cube in his hands, presses the corners briefly into his palms and he catches Bruce giving him a strange look. “What?”

“We leave and that’s the only thing you brought?”

“This and my gun,” James says. “Elyse stole all my grenades.” _Besides_ , he thinks, _you’re all in the van, all in one piece. What else do I need?_

 

— — —

 

Cyneburg opens the large, heavy door for them without seeing who he was opening it for—or maybe he did; James didn’t doubt that the property was littered with hidden cameras, keeping an eye on nearly every inch of the property—and Adam slowly rolls the van inside, the six of them listening as the gate whines and quivers as it closes behind them. The ceiling is high, metal beams and cords thicker than any of their arms hanging down, waiting to be attached to machinery and a wide, pale yellow light swings gently right above where they parked, casting eerie shadows on the beat-up concrete walls. Red metal boxes overstuffed with tools are crowded in a small area, made to almost look like tiny skyscrapers in a toy city. A saw with angry, monstrous teeth waits for its prey in a darkened corner and, when they all clamber out, they can see a body moving inside the rectangular office tucked off to the side, know that its the same person who let them in but also knowing the chances of said person starting a conversation with them was slim to none.

The guy didn’t care _why_ they were here, just that they were loyal enough customers that he didn’t have to ask any questions. James was sure that this wasn’t the first time that someone had to come here to hide—the benefits of having a place that seemed to exist outside the rest of the world.

“Well,” Adam says, once they’re all standing together and Lawrence kicks his heel at a ground-in oil stain, “Here we are.” They’re looking at James, as if because he was the one to suggest leaving, he should also already have the rest of a plan and he holds the cube in one hand to use the other to put up in the air but then he sighs, clenches his jaw to grind his teeth together as he thought about it. The person who left this cube to them obviously knew who they were and, despite knowing a lot of people, this was a surprisingly small town once you got down to the underbelly of it—everyone knew everyone and, because of that, everyone knew everyone’s business. They find an acquaintance and if they didn’t have an answer, they could talk to someone else who might or, at least, point them in the right direction.

“ _Someone_ has to know where this damn thing came from,” James says after he explains all of that to them. “We just have to figure out where to start.”

“Joel,” Bruce says without much hesitation. “Joel would know.” He clears his throat awkwardly when the others stare at him. “I’m just saying, he’s always had his ear to the ground, a lot more than any of us ever did.”

“I don’t know about that…” Lawrence starts to say but Adam just speaks over him.

“Do we even know where he is anymore?” Joel had been a part of their crew for almost four years until one morning they had woken up to find a handwritten note on their kitchen table from him, saying that he wanted to ‘move on’ and that it wasn’t them, really, it was him. ( _I can’t believe he broke up with us by writing a letter and then sneaking out_ , Elyse had said after reading it out loud. There was a lot of debate about what ‘moving on’ actually meant—were they not good enough for him, did another crew make him a better offer, was he murdered and this was a ruse to stop them from looking for him—and some of them took his disappearance better than others.) As far as James knew, the guy had simply dropped off the face of the Earth, hadn’t put very much effort into contacting them again either out of shame or wanting to somehow make things easier but, from the way Bruce had easily suggested going to him for help, it seemed that Joel had cherry-picked who he was willing to talk to—either that, or it was a testimony as to how persistent Bruce could be sometimes.

“Sure,” Bruce admits. “ _I_ know where he is. I could get us there.”

“And he’ll actually talk to us?” Lawrence asks.

“He doesn’t hate you guys,” Bruce says. “He just— You know.” They _don’t_ know is the thing, but Bruce won’t say anything more than that so James gives him a reprieve from the uncomfortable silence.

“We’ll hang here until the sun’s up, then,” James says. He doesn’t know why that would make a difference, really, but it feels right. Maybe it’s just the grossly optimistic part of him that’s hoping whoever is after them would give up, especially after having at least five of their own killed fairly swiftly. People tended to underestimate them since all they heard about were their numerous blunders, how many times a job had gone wrong before they got it right but, once face-to-face with them, they started to whistle a slightly different tune. So: wait it out. Go find Joel, go home and clean up the mess they had left behind.

But that’s when the knocking starts.

It’s not particularly hard but, because of what the fist is banging against, it rattles the metal, echoes it everywhere around them and it’s almost deafening. James can feel the color draining from his face. It wasn’t _impossible_ for those men to find them here but it was incredibly unlikely and yet here they were, asking as politely as possible if they wouldn’t mind letting them in so they could try to shoot them again.

There’s a familiar creaking whine and it takes them all a second to realize that it’s the gate lifting. Both Bruce and Elyse turn towards the office, shaking their heads, arms waving, yelling at Cyneburg to stop but it’s too late and there, on the sidewalk, the same way they had been when they left their own garage, are four black-suited men, stiff and oddly stoic. A brief, ear ringing moment when nobody moves and then one of the men lifts a rigid arm, fingers curling until there’s only the index finger left, and he points directly at the cube.

James glances down at it, shrugs and then chucks it towards them but not a single one makes a move to actually catch it and it bounces, tumbles against the hard ground, skitters to a halt at the feet of the man who had pointed and the four of them peer down at it before lifting their gaze back at the rest of them and they start to reach into their jackets.

“It’s what you want,” James says, “There it is! Take it!” But they can’t hear him or maybe they just don’t care because there are guns and James is scarily aware of the fact that all their own weapons were still in the van and the back of it was facing the people trying to kill them. “ _Shit_ ,” he curses, “ _Fuck_.” And he takes out his gun from where he had hid it, crosses his fingers that it was loaded, grabs Elyse by the arm to yank her behind him, and starts shooting.

He gets one guy in the upper chest, right between his heart and his shoulder, nails a second in the hip which isn’t enough to kill him but it’s enough to put him on the ground and hopefully keep him there. Bruce is diving down towards the van, lands hard on his knees and he’s going to regret it later but, for now, he’s reaching underneath the vehicle, feeling around and detaches a shotgun that had been stored there, hoists himself up and rounds the engine, pumps and fires without putting much thought into aiming. The entire thing lasts maybe a minute and, when it’s over, the ringing silence is pulled back over them.

Three of them are dead but the one that James had hit in the hip is twitching on his side and they walk over, James crouching down in front of him, grabbing him by the collar, stares at his own reflection in the man’s sunglasses.

“Who are you?” He asks, gives him a shake. “What do you have to do with this?” He picks up the cube from where it had landed, shows it to the man but there’s no reaction. James gives him another shake, is about to ask him again, make him realize how _serious_ he was about getting some answers when the man suddenly slams his own head down on the concrete sidewalk with surprising force, moving despite the grip James had on him and James tries to hold him still but he can’t, lets go and stumbles backward, feet kicking his body away, all of them watching as the man pounds his own forehead against the filthy ground, over and over until the skin had split, until blood was exploding from the cracks, until there was a dent and then, with one last sickening smack, he dies.

“Holy shit,” Lawrence says after a seemingly endless silence.

“He—” Elyse starts but can’t finish and James feels a hand on his shoulder, grabs at it without thinking before turning to look up and see Matt standing there. James keeps his fingers around his wrist for a few seconds before letting go to pat at the back of his hand and then stands, clenches and unclenches his fists. A body moves up next to him, presses into his side and Elyse’s hair brushes against the bare skin on his arm.

“What the _fuck_ is going on?” Bruce whispers and they all jump when they hear a gunshot behind them, turn just in time to see blood and brain matter splattered on one of the office windows, Cyneburg’s body dropping like a sack of flour, a man in a black suit standing in front of him, holding a gun. He tries to shoot again but the glass is bulletproof, merely cracks with the impact.

“I think,” Adam says, and his hair is a mess from where he had been running his fingers through it, a sign of how truly stressed he was, but his voice is almost unnervingly calm, “We should go find Joel a little earlier than planned.” He flinches when the gun fires again, creates another webbed hole and James doesn’t understand why the guy hasn’t figured out that this isn’t working, that he could just turn his body and walk out to them but he won’t, in the end, look a gift horse in its gaping mouth.

They’re all starting to pile back into the van and he’s about to join them when he hesitates, goes over to retrieve the cube.

“What the _hell_ are you doing?” Bruce asks, blocking the door when James tries to climb in and James blinks up at him, confused by his actions. “That thing—”

“—Is going to follow us no matter where we go,” James says. “They want it but—” He’s interrupted, shoulders lifting in a wince when the gun goes off again and he has to hope that the owner of The Crown had at least sprung for the good stuff and not a weak knock-off that would give in after one too many hits. He tries again. “They want it but they obviously won’t take it unless we’re dead. Leaving it here— Goddammit, Bruce, just let me in the _fucking_ _van_.” Bruce does and he very nearly looks instantly apologetic, as if he didn’t know what had come over him but James just shakes his head. _It’s okay. I get it_.

As they get further away, James can hear the man still shooting, again and again, still somehow thinking that, eventually, he might hit someone.

 

— — —

 

“Everyone good?” Matt asks as Adam drives. Bruce had clambered over into the passenger seat since he was the only one who knew how to get to wherever it was that Joel had stashed himself and the rest of them were huddled in the back again, sitting a bit closer to one another and James checks, hadn’t even thought about the possibility that he might have been hit by a stray bullet until someone else asked about it. He nods once at Matt, watches Elyse pat herself down and confirm that she, too, was unharmed. Lawrence doesn’t respond, isn’t moving and James bumps into him to get his attention.

“Hmm?” He blinks, looks over at James and then turns to acknowledge the other two across from him. “I’m fine,” he says, as if he hadn’t actually heard what was asked but did his best to guess at the right answer.

James has his mouth open, ready to say something—although, what that was going to be he wasn’t entirely sure—when the van jolts forward, the four in the back lurching along with it, colliding with each other and James can hear Adam curse.

“Someone fucking—” Someone had slammed into them from behind—not hard enough to send them swerving off the road, but enough to make a point—and it happens again, this time slightly harder and Matt catches Elyse by the back of her jacket before she goes toppling onto the ground. “Son of a— Can you see who it is?” He’s asking Bruce, who rolls down his window, leans out to peer behind them, says something into the wind and then pulls himself back inside the vehicle.

“It’s a—” _Thud_. He steadies himself on the dashboard. “It’s something big and black, I can tell you that. They don’t have their damn headlights on.” Adam has a stretch of open road, a little room to maneuver and speeds up, switches lanes and listens as a car leans on their horn as he moves their van out in front of it. The assault stops for a moment and James has the audacity, apparently, to think that they had already managed to lose them.

The next strike comes from the right, a heavy object slamming into something not quite as compact and, for a couple harrowing seconds, the van is only balancing on the two left wheels before Adam manages to right it again, a verbal salad of profanity spilling out as he slams his foot on the gas but this isn’t a sports car, isn’t a vehicle made for a slick getaway, and they can only go so fast.

He’s about to take a turn, the steering wheel spinning dizzyingly under his hands, but he doesn’t quite make it; the nose of whatever was chasing them smashes into the back, just a few feet away from where James was sitting, and the body of the van crumples where it had been hit and then the whole vehicle lifts a foot off the ground and flips onto its side.

James can hear shouting, can see legs and arms flailing but isn’t sure who they belong to and all he can think is that he was still in pain from being blown up and now there was a less than zero chance he’d be feeling any better any time in the near future. The van slides a few feet and then stops, James landing between two other bodies and, for a horrifying moment, nobody speaks. His head is already starting to hurt from where it hit the side of the van, his side from where it collided with the bench, and the toes from someone’s shoes brush against the side of his leg. He feels fingers on his shoulder as if it’s searching for _something_ to be there and he pulls his own arm out from where it had been wedged between his body and the one next to him and finds the hand the fingers belong to, recognizes them as Elyse’s.

He lifts his head and sees her lying on her back, still somehow almost sitting in her seat as if the force had held her down.

“Are you—?” He asks quietly and she manages a _yeah, I think so_ , brushes hair out of her face with the shaky hand that James wasn’t holding. He pushes himself up more on his elbows and is at least grateful that the van hadn’t been packed with equipment because, if it had, they probably would have been crushed. “Everyone still here?” He asks louder, let’s go of Elyse and crouches on what used to be a wall and was now the floor, reaches up to steady himself on one of the benches in the back that now hung over his head.

“I think so,” Adam says and his voice sounds strained, gets a confirmation next from Bruce who lifts an arm to brush glass from his hair.

“Peake,” Elyse says, reaches over the space that James had just vacated and she can’t quite touch him.

“I’m alright,” he says. This whole time James is keeping one ear on everyone, the other outside, waiting for footsteps or gunfire but there’s nothing, there isn’t even anyone else coming to help them as if the other cars that he had remembered hearing had vanished in a puff of smoke and they were left suddenly and eerily alone. “Lawrence.” His name is met with a groan and James crawls over, moves as close beside him as he could manage in the limited space.

“Is he alright?” Bruce is asking, trying to turn in his seat as he fumbles with his seatbelt, fighting to unlock it, asks again a little more insistent when James doesn’t answer right away. Lawrence has turned himself over onto his back and one of the lenses on his glasses is cracked, a slow stream of blood coming from his nose.

“Yeah,” Lawrence says, “Yeah. I’m—” He tries to sit up, curses and puts his head back against the wall of the van. “Shit.” Bruce has gotten himself unbuckled and he manipulates himself until he’s got his feet on the armrest and he sticks his head out the broken window.

“The bad news,” he says when he crouches back down into the wrecked van, “Is there’s a black SUV with a screwed up front end just sitting out there, waiting.”

“What’s the good news?” Adam asks as he grapples with his own seatbelt, manages to get it undone and slides sideways into his door, shoulder hitting broken glass and the road through the empty window.

“It doesn’t look like there’s anybody inside it.”

“And how is that _good_ exactly?”

“I don’t know. It’s how I’m choosing to see it,” Bruce says, pulls on his handle and pushes forward, the door swinging out towards the dark purple, very early morning sky, grabs the edge of the van and hoists himself out and over, feet hitting the ground and then he’s standing on his toes, leaning in, offering a hand to Adam who drags himself over, accepts the help even though he didn’t really need it and tumbles the same way Bruce had gone. “Who’s next?” Matt says something to Elyse as if he’s letting her go first but she replies with a soft, negative tone and James hears him ask her: _you sure?_ , as if she was taking a risk staying behind a little while longer.

“Just go,” she says to him and he squeezes past the others, gets himself out and Elyse sidles up over to James and Lawrence. “Is it bad?” She’s not directing it at either one of them in particular, even though it’s James who she glances apprehensively at when the words leave her mouth.

“No,” James teases, “He’s just being a baby.”

“I’m _not_ being a baby,” Lawrence objects. “It fucking _hurts_.”

“What does?” James asks, abruptly serious, but Lawrence doesn’t answer. “ _Lawrence_.”

“Nevermind,” he says. “Don’t— Can we just get out of here?” Like he hadn’t been the one refusing to move, as if James or Elyse were keeping him here, trapped in a rolled-over van. His nose is still bleeding as he wipes at it with his sleeve and it helps, but only for a couple of seconds.

“Fine. Okay,” James says, takes as much of a step back as he could, helps Elyse pass in front of him and they share a look that spoke volumes before she, too, clambers out of the vehicle. He and Lawrence do, eventually, make it out and James is the last one, loads himself up with the bags that were almost left behind (he finds the cube, settled into a corner, stuffs it into Elyse’s backpack with the grenades), tosses them out the open door before following and—other than the ominous SUV just as Bruce had described the intersection they had been flipped at—it is, as it had sounded, completely abandoned.

“This isn’t right,” Bruce says. Even in the neighborhoods that they travelled in, it was unlikely for any area of the city to be this empty. There was always _someone_ coming home late, going out too early, stumbling drunk or just plain lost, opening stores or cleaning the fronts of ones that never seemed to close. James thinks about going to look over the vehicle hovering there just a few feet away, can feel an angry warmth going up the back of his neck because he knows, _he just knows_ that someone is actually in there and shooting at them when they have the chance to return the favor is one thing but James can’t protect them all from a car accident. Maybe he’s more mad at himself than their attackers but he has to take it out on _someone_ and beating himself up doesn’t matter if he’s already in pain so he starts to walk towards the truck when a hand grasps his arm, stopping him, and he turns his head over his shoulder to see Adam.

“Just leave it,” he tells him. _We’re fine_ , his face says, _We’re all okay, mostly. Let it go_. “What’s that thing you and Bruce always say?”

“Sure,” James says, gives the car one more glare before going to join the rest of the group. Lawrence’s nose is still dripping but seems to be slowing down and Bruce has a few cuts on his face but, otherwise, they’ve been in worse condition from a lot less before. James can feel his muscles starting to ache, a sharp pain between his shoulders and down his back, and he takes in a slow breath through his nose.

“Guess we’re walking the rest of the way,” Bruce is saying. “I can still get us there. No problem.” He lead the way, the rest of them trailing behind as they desert their wrecked van, leaving the hunk of metal in the street for someone else to deal with later.

 

— — —

 

“I don’t understand why they aren’t going after us now,” Elyse says as they walk and she’s got her hands wrapped around herself even though it isn’t particularly chilly outside. James thinks about admonishing her, telling her not to jinx it but he’s also aware of how valid a concern it is.

“I’d say it’s because they don’t want to call attention to themselves or make a scene but, well…” Adam says from where he’s keeping pace with Bruce who’s leading the group, stopping to mutter to himself, point in one direction and then the other only to have them continue moving in a straight line. Lawrence is in the rear, taking it slow, and Matt is with him, hands in his pockets. James can feel his eyes boring into the back of his neck and it takes everything in him to not turn around and ask loudly what he expects him to do. _Of course_ he’s concerned. He’s worried but he can’t carry him—he would if he could—and besides: Lawrence is ornery; there’s only so many times even _he_ can demand he tell him what’s wrong before he completely shuts down.

“Maybe they’re toying with us,” Elyse says. “Maybe this is all some kind of messed up game.”

“They could be tracking it,” Lawrence says and James tries to listen to how he speaks, to his cadence, but nothing sounds particularly off. Maybe he _was_ just being a baby. “The cube, I mean. The signal could be jacked up. I’d suggest dumping it but we all know how _that’ll_ turn out.” Nobody says anything else for a short while until James notices Elyse rubbing at the sides of her face with her palms, a sign that something else is bothering her, that there’s a thought in there that had it’s claws in her and it wouldn’t break its grip.

“What is it?” He asks and she doesn’t act surprised that he can read her so easily.

“That guy who killed himself…” She starts, trails off.

“Yeah. I think that’s the most violent way I’ve ever seen someone try to get out of having to talk to me,” James says, attempts to make a joke out of it and she does actually laugh lightly. They clearly know a hell of a lot more about what the cube was than James and the others did and either they were told to take themselves out if forced to talk or they hadn’t expected to be confronted and didn’t know how else to get themselves out of the situation.

One of those possible options meant that they worked for someone else, someone with more power and weren’t just running around unsupervised, that they were given _orders_ to kill not as a last resort but as a first one but the other… well, that meant that all their strange, robotic movements, confusion and impassiveness ( _he looked right through me_ , Lawrence had said, _like I was just an obstacle_ ) had some meaning, too, that he couldn’t for the life of him begin to try and understand.

James isn’t sure which one he found more unsettling.

 

— — —

 

“Hang on, hang on!” They can hear a familiar voice from the other side of the white-painted apartment door that Bruce was banging an open palm against and there’s four clicks from four different locks being undone and then the door opens to reveal Joel standing in the doorway, looking almost exactly the same way he had when they last saw him. His eyes widen, eyebrows lifting with surprised. “Uh… Wow. Okay. Hi,” he says and then: “You guys look like shit.”

“Then we look a hell of a lot better than we feel,” Adam says and Joel rubs at the back of his head, looks to Bruce.

“What’s going on?” It’s been almost a year since they’d seen each other—although looking at how he’s staring at Bruce and how Bruce knew exactly where to find him, it was even more clear than before that Joel was only hiding himself from the others which, really, didn’t surprise James in the slightest considering what he knew about them that they probably thought he didn’t—and he expected Joel to be more on edge but he was taking the whole thing relatively well. How long that was going to last was anybody’s guess, though.

“This is what’s going on,” James says, unzips Elyse’s backpack, pulls out the cube and Joel’s facade of calm turns immediately to panic.

“No,” he says, puts up his hands, “No, no, no. No! I do not— Get that— No. You have to get that out of here. Get it the— No.”

“So you know what it is?”

“Of course I fucking know what it is!” Joel shouts but then leans slightly forward, checks left and right down the hallway and lowers his voice to a harsh whisper. “How could you _not_?” He puts his hands over his face, breathes into them for a moment before addressing them once again. “Look, I love you guys, okay? And at the risk of ruining whatever last vestiges of friendship we have left, I do not want you here with that thing.”

“Joel,” Bruce says evenly.

“Come on, Bruce. No.”

“Joel.”

“Bruce, it’s… I mean…” Joel gestures at the cube still clutched in James’ hands.

“Joel,” Bruce just says for a third time and Joel stares at him, frowning, and then glances to the others.

“Fine,” he says. “Fine.” He steps aside to let them file in through the door and Bruce waits, is the last to go in and, as he wanders further into the apartment, James can hear Joel say to Bruce: _I hate you_ and Bruce responds: _nah, you don’t_.

The apartment is small and all angular lines, the lights low, the walls made of neat, clean brick but it’s surprisingly warm inside. There’s a mass of papers and pens, plans and copied blueprints scattered and in their own sort of disorganized order on a low coffee table, a laptop balanced on a pillow on the couch, the window across from it looking out through a fire escape and then out towards the building next door. It seems, at first glance, that this place is cheap and James would joke with Joel, ask him if leaving them was worth having to squeeze himself into this sort of space but he knows that looks—especially in this city—were deceiving and he just didn’t have it in him to continue to keep up any sort of positive momentum (he can imagine saying so some other time to Elyse, can see her putting the back of her hand on his forehead, asking if he was feeling alright but now, he almost feels as if she’d understand).

“Okay, here’s the thing,” Joel says once they’re all occupying the same space, “What you’re holding right now… I’m honestly surprised that this is the first time someone’s tried to give it to you.” He hesitates. “Someone— I mean, someone _did_ give it to you, right?”

“We found it by the front door with a note,” Matt tells him and James feels around in his pockets but he must have left it back at their place, doesn’t remember taking it from his person but it’s definitely not there anymore. He wonders idly if the men they had left behind were still there, waiting, and he finds himself glancing out the window, doesn’t realize he’s searching for the black smoke of a building on fire until he’s relieved not to see any. He’s not sure why he thought they might have torched it but, for some reason, it felt horribly like a possibility.

“So someone must really hate you,” Joel says. “Or they were desperate.” He exhales slowly, paces once, twice, three times before ending up right back where he had been standing, moves his hands as he talks. “I really don’t know as much as you obviously think I do but I _have_ heard of it and I do know that people who get their grubby little hands on it tend to die.” He doesn’t give them a moment to let the words sink in, maybe because just by looking at them anybody could tell that _death_ was already doing a soft-shoe around them. “I’m shocked that Lawrence hasn’t. Aren’t you supposed to know everything?”

“I never said I knew _everything_ , Joel, it’s just that most people don’t—” Lawrence starts but Bruce steps in between them, puts a hand in front of each of their faces so they couldn’t see each other and the boilings of a squabble is stopped. Joel wraps fingers around Bruce’s wrist, pushes his arm away, furrows his eyebrows at him.

“All I know is that if someone gives one to you, you die.”

“There’re more than one of these?” Adam asks.

“I don’t know,” Joel admits, “Maybe. There have to be, right? How does it wind up with a new person if the person who had it before them is dead? It can’t just… choose a new owner. Or it could. Like I said, I only know a little. Just people talking. ‘Oh, Joe got gifted some weird box and now he’s gone’, ‘he left it to his wife and she’s been locked in her home for three days and then ordered pizza and gave it to the delivery guy and then someone shot him a couple hours later’. That kind of stuff.”

“How do you just… _hear_ things like that?” Lawrence asks, leans around Bruce to speak directly to Joel again.

“Because people actually like talking to me, _Lawrence_ ,” Joel replies, enunciates both syllables when he says his name. “Listen, you guys are still my friends, alright? At least I hope you are. And Bruce and I— I’m not going to throw you out in the cold just yet but you can’t stay here forever, either. I’m not particularly interested in finding out if it’s just you who—” He makes a slicing motion across his neck, “—or anyone that happens to be in proximity.” James flashes back to Cyneburg, to his brains on the window, to the mysteriously vanished cars during their accident, and listens to Joel let out another sigh. “I’d offer you guys some ideas for where to lay low for awhile but I have a feeling that won’t really matter.” He hesitates, takes a moment to catch his breath before asking: “What’s it like? Is it random mishaps, like the world is out to get you or—?”

“It’s these men in cheap suits,” Bruce says. “We kill two and four more show up.”

“They want this,” Elyse follows, gestures at the cube and Joel takes a quick step backwards, moves away from it just a little more. “One of them pointed right at it. James tried to give it to them but they just kept shooting.”

“Maybe they didn’t want it. Maybe they’re just letting us know that hey, this is why this is happening to you,” James says. He doesn’t mention to Joel the man that killed himself rather than talk to them, doesn’t explain how inhuman they seemed, swerves the subject just slightly back towards something Joel had mentioned a minute or so earlier. “You said people can get rid of it by passing it on?”

“I don’t think you can just… leave it in a park, hope some poor schmuck picks it up, if that’s what you’re hoping. You have to physically give it to a person, make it clear, _this is yours now_ ,” Joel says.

“So, what,” Bruce says, “We find someone we hate and give to them?”

“I guess,” Joel replies, “Unless you think you can last long enough to figure out how to destroy it, stop the cycle. You wouldn’t be the first to try but I feel like you might have a better chance than most just because of, you know, who you are.”

“And who are we, exactly?” Adam asks.

“Stubborn, persistent assholes,” Joel says with a faint smile.

“You know,” Lawrence says, “For someone who claims not to know much, you sure seem to know a hell of a lot about this thing.”

“Yeah, well, I may have under-exaggerated my knowledge of this monstrosity. Hypothetically, this might not be the first time I’ve actually seen it.”

“You didn’t—” Bruce starts to say. “Someone—”

“—Gave it to me? No. But I knew someone who got it. He showed it to me,” Joel says. “Not _directly_. But I was there. I was listening.”

“What happened to him?” Matt asks after being his usual sort of quiet, absorbing everything that was going on.

“Dunno. Ran out of the building. Never heard from him again. I suppose I’ve been sort of keeping my ear out for information on it since then, but it’s surprisingly difficult to find anything.”

“You’re just not looking in the right places,” Lawrence says and Joel makes a face at him before continuing.

“I definitely now mean what I told you, though: that really is all I know. And I meant what I said before, too: You can’t stay here. I’ll help however I can but I don’t want to get caught in the crossfire on this one.”

“You don’t happen to have any phones laying around we could borrow, do you? We kind of left our place in a hurry,” James says, doesn’t argue and neither does anyone else because, he figures, they all know deep down inside that Joel wasn’t really being unreasonable, that any minute now the men in their black suits would catch up with them and the carnage would begin anew; anyone who knew what was coming would be stupid for inviting it when they could so easily dodge out of the way.

“Sure, yeah,” Joel says, “I think I’ve got a couple burners around here somewhere.” He wanders off down a short hall, disappears through a door and Elyse huddles closer to the five of them, studies each face one by one as she speaks, as if wanting to make sure they could see for themselves how serious she was.

“Whatever happens, we’re not giving this to anyone. I know we’re unruly, we’re impulsive, we’re trigger-happy. But we’re not cowards. And burdening someone else with… with this _thing_ is the coward’s way out.”

“She's right. And so’s Joel,” Bruce says. “If anyone can figure out how to stop this? It’s us. So…” He puts his hand out, palm down in the center of the circle they’re standing in and Elyse doesn’t hesitate, reaches out to rest her’s on top.

“Really, Bruce?” Adam asks. “We’re going to—”

“We could vote on it, if you’d prefer.”

“No,” Adam says, almost too quickly, puts his hand in, too and Matt follows, saying nothing. James is next after that and, finally, Lawrence.

“We stick together, we figure this shit out.” Elyse says, nods once. “We’re not cowards.”

“No you are not,” Joel says and they all separate to see him standing with four generic phones piled in his hands and he offers them to whoever would take them first but holds onto the fourth one, flips it open, points at the bright screen. “You’ll call me.” It’s not a question, and he says it more to Bruce than anyone else in the room. “I’ll give you another twenty minutes but then you—” But he’s interrupted by the sound of someone knocking on his door and it’s as if every single person in the room stops breathing at the exact same time.

“Do not open that door,” Bruce whispers, talks out of the side of his mouth.

“Hadn’t even considered it,” Joel responds equally as quiet, points at his window. “Fire escape.”

Bruce is the last one out, James second-to-last and, because of that, he’s aware of the two of them having a hurried, muttered conversation that ends with Bruce saying: _I know_. Their feet clang against the metal and they’ve all made it down into the alley when they hear the gun go off above them. Bruce freezes and they all wait but there’s nothing else.

“We gotta go,” Elyse is saying to him. “Bruce, come on. We gotta go.” She’s got a hand on his arm, tugs at him and, after a few more pulls, he grudgingly follows.

 

— — —

 

“Where are we even going?” Adam asks, not for the first time that night. It’s a decent question. It feels like they’ve been going in circles, walking and walking, just continuing to move for the sake of moving and the sun is finally starting to wake up, the sky turning grey-blue, clouds dark as the faint beginnings of light fights with the pollution. It’s still going to be another hour or so until the sun really starts to make is ascent over the buildings and, for once, James doesn’t think that a brand new day is going to fix any of their problems (not that he subscribed to the whole _new day, new beginning_ school of thought; it was more that he had found that almost any issue you were dealing with usually had a solution once you’ve given yourself a chance to sleep on it or, at least, a few hours to not overthink things but, when sleep wasn’t an option and thinking too much is the only thing you can do, solutions are rarely within reach).

“Maybe we can go back,” Elyse says, means back to their building, back to their home. “Maybe they won’t be waiting for us. We lock the doors, hole up inside. They can’t come in unless we let them in, right?”

“I don’t want to take any chances,” James says. “We’ve had nothing but bad luck for the past few hours. I’m not optimistic it’ll improve that much.”

“Okay then,” Adam says, “You have any bright ideas? Because I’m running on empty here.”

“Our old place,” Lawrence says shakily and James slows his walking, moves beside him and Lawrence blinks slowly at him but, other than that, he can’t see what’s wrong.

“The loft? I can’t believe it’s still standing,” Adam says, almost with a chuckle. They had started small, started with what they could afford and, at the time, what they could afford was practically rubble; they spent more time making repairs—worrying about whether one of them wouldn’t wake up one morning because the ceiling had collapsed on them in the middle of the night, taking cold showers because the plumbing never worked right—than they did actually _working_. Eventually, though, they had made names for themselves and were finally able to kiss that dilapidated mess goodbye. James had figured that it would be gone, either from lack of upkeep or someone knocking it down to make room for fancy apartment buildings nobody could afford to live in.

“Sure,” Lawrence says. “Technically I still own my share of it. I kept it around for, you know. Reasons. It’s secure. It’ll buy us some time at the very least.”

 

— — —

 

It looks exactly as James remembered it, except now there was a lot less in the way of furniture. He steps on a soft spot on the wooden floor, feels it sink a bit under his heel, stares at the spray painted wall on the other side of the expansive space, meaningless scrawls in red and white and can’t remember if one of them had been responsible or if it had been that way when they moved in—or perhaps, the work of intruders. There’s the column, bent and cracked from a misfired weapon, the burnt spot on the windowsill from where the microwave had caught on fire thanks to faulty wiring, although James knew that it was really because a drunken Lawrence had put leftovers in a metal container inside it one late night.

“We shouldn’t have left,” Bruce is saying to Elyse, having continued the hushed conversation they had started shortly after leaving Joel’s, the two of them lingering back behind as they walked for privacy, keeping their feet slow but not slow enough that they lost track of the rest of the group.

“You know he can handle himself,” Elyse says. “Remember that time with the box? We didn’t think he’d make it out of that one either but the worst thing was him having to walk around like this for a couple of days.” She hunches her back, holds her arms funny, bends her knees and hobbles around. Bruce smiles, but it’s faint and only lasts a second or two. “He recovered. You really think some douchebag with a gun is gonna take our Joel-e-o down?”

While they talk, Adam and Peake get themselves reacquainted with the space, make sure windows are as fortified as they could be, that the doors are shut tight, both of them knowing that locking it wouldn’t really matter. James goes over to Lawrence, who had settled his stuff on a drop-cloth that had been left on the floor and was now staring at the wall, but had a look in his eyes as if he was somehow seeing through it to somewhere else entirely.

He’s about to say something to him when the knocking starts on the other side of the door leading into the loft and they all freeze, spinning around to stare at it. How did they find them so quickly? It took almost twenty minutes, possibly slightly more, to track them down at Joel’s but, then again, they’d have to wait for someone to let them into the building, they’d have to find the stairs, climb to the right floor. Here, just like where they had abandoned first, the door is outside, no other obstacles in between other than a piece of metal.

“It’s alright,” Bruce says, keeps his voice surprisingly placid, cool and collected, “He can’t get in, remember?” They _do_ remember but it doesn’t mean that the sound isn’t going to put them on edge. After another thirty seconds of listening to it, waiting, they all slowly go back to what they had been doing. Each time the fist hits metal, James can feel creepy crawlers tickling up his spine but he fights to ignore them, to tune it out and returns his attention to Lawrence.

“Hey,” James says and Lawrence slowly turns his head, stares at him, forces a tight-lipped smile. “Your nose.” The blood that had been spilling like rivulets from it after they crashed was mostly dried, red staining the space between his nostrils and mouth and he scrubs at it with his sleeve before James can, pulls it away and glances at the fabric, a thick, wet spot from new flowing blood.

“Ah, shit,” Lawrence says, puts his sleeve back to try and staunch the steady leakage and James bends over to pick up a corner of the drop-cloth at their feet, tears at the frayed material until it rips, pulls a narrow strip from it, shakes off the dust and then wads it into a ball. Taking Lawrence’s arm away from his face, he replaces his shirt sleeve with the cloth and holds it there.

“Here,” James says, puts his other hand on the back of his neck, tilts his head forward slightly and Lawrence sighs, swallows, closes his eyes. “Lawrence.” It’s said after a few seconds of them just standing there, James trying to stop the bleeding and Lawrence just letting it happen and his name comes out from his mouth soft, careful.

“Yeah?” He responds, voice muffled slightly by the fabric pressed to his face.

“Please tell me what hurts.” James doesn’t ask him if something _does_ hurt, because he already knows, Lawrence had said as much back in the van and, even then, if he didn’t know then he did now. He could just tell. He knew. For what feels like too long of a time, Lawrence doesn’t say anything but then:

“My head. It’s fucking killing me.”

“Okay,” James says gently, looks just past him at the others who were now hovering, watching them, but he stares specifically at Elyse, shakes his head and she frowns, looks to Bruce, to Adam and Matt and James can see her mouth: _not good_. “Where? Where does it—”

“Everywhere,” Lawrence tells him and James uses his free hand to feel for lumps but can’t find anything, doesn’t know if that’s a good sign or not but he keeps his fingers in his hair, the pads smoothing through, soothing against his scalp.

“You should have said something.”

“What difference would it have made? We still would have gone to Joel’s. We would have had to leave.”

“You could have stayed with Joel,” James says. “They’re only following that stupid cube. You wouldn’t—”

“You guys need me,” Lawrence says, finally opens his eyes again. “I just have to sit for a minute is all. I’ll be fine.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“You don’t have to,” Lawrence says. “But it’s true.” He reaches up to take the fabric pressed to his nose from James, pulls it away to look at the splotchy blood stains left behind. “There’s— There’s too much to do. I can’t— Just let me help, alright? I just need a minute.”

“Sure,” James says, “Alright.” He watches Lawrence take a step back and then turn and carefully lower himself down on the floor, plants himself beside his bag and yanks out his computer, crossing his legs to provide a mostly stable surface for it to rest. When he opens the screen, he moves his head away from the explosion of light, dims the brightness as low as it could go and James sits down beside him without saying anything, mimics his position, holds his hands around his knees. He wants to tell him: _this doesn’t look like you ‘taking a minute’,_ but he doesn’t, knows that nagging him wasn’t going to help.

“When the cube first showed up, did it’s thing,” Lawrence is saying as he starts to type, not to anyone in particular but they’re all listening, “I tried to do some poking around but, even with me at the helm, trying to find anything with such frustratingly broad search terms didn’t get me anywhere. But after what’s been going on, with these men and everything Joel said… I don’t know. Might be able to find something.”

“Meanwhile,” Bruce says, goes to one of the bags of weapons they were still hauling around with them and picks blindly, comes back with a heavy pistol, aims it at Elyse’s bag and she shouts, launches forward to grab his arm and direct it up towards the ceiling.

“Jesus Christ, Bruce! Grenades!”

“Holy shit,” Bruce says. “Seriously?”

“Yes, seriously! What the hell did you _think_ was in there?”

“Besides the cube? Dunno. But I didn’t think it was _grenades_. Probably would have done the job, though, if you think about it,” Bruce says, lowers his arm and waits for Elyse to unzip her backpack, nudge the cube out from the opening without touching it directly and then she moves her explosives over by the window, out of the way. “Okay. Here we go.” The gunshot echoes, cracks in the space around them, and the bullet ricochets. Bruce dives, Elyse, Adam and Matt all put hands over their heads, try to make themselves smaller and James is pretty sure it wouldn’t fly in his direction but he leans over, moves Lawrence’s head closer to the computer, closer towards the floor and hides his own face under his arm. When they’re all sure it’s safe they search around, but it’s not clear where the bullet had traveled and Bruce tosses the gun, goes to rummage around for something else, comes back with the shotgun he had used much earlier to kill one of the men in suits that had originally been stored underneath the van. “Round two,” he says, pumps it, aims down, and fires.

The impact is enough to move the cube back an inch or two but, other than that, it doesn’t make a dent and buckshot sprays around it, pockmarks the wooden floor and seems to narrow miss drilling a hole in Matt’s leg.

“Goddammit,” Bruce says, points the barrel away from everyone, down to towards the floor, “What the hell is thing made out of?”

“Did we bring anything more powerful?” Matt asks, takes his hands away from his ears.

“If you did,” Adam says, “You’re not firing it in here. This place is falling apart as it is, I don’t need you cutting it in half with an AK. We don’t have anywhere else to go.”

“I think we can safely assume that a gun isn’t going to cut it unless you’ve got a bazooka hidden in your shorts,” James says, immediately regrets it when Bruce glances to him, raises his eyebrows. Elyse mutters something but it’s too quiet and all James can hear is Joel’s name. Bruce seems to hear her perfectly though, loses his comical expression, turns to glare at her and she laughs once, ducks just slightly behind Adam, as if she honestly thought Bruce was going to take a swing at her. “So okay: No guns. What else do we have?”

“Grenades,” Bruce says, points at Elyse’s backpack.

“Hang on,” Adam says, “Does anyone have a— You know,” He makes a writing gesture in the air with his hand and everyone starts patting down their pockets until Matt pulls an old marker from a his heavy jacket but that’s as good as it’ll get because paper wasn’t necessarily a priority for anyone when they had made any of their numerous swift exits. Adam goes over to one of the large windows, wipes it down with his sleeve, grimaces at the dirt and then starts to write on the glass. ‘GUNS’ is first but he crosses it off seconds after he’s written it. “Like James said,” Adam explains, “Unless we find a bazooka, we can assume any gun is off the table here. So, alright...” ‘GRENADES’ is after that and then he stops, looks over his shoulder, arm raised, waiting for any other ideas.

“I’ve got a couple matches,” Matt says, takes them out of a different pocket that the marker came from.

“Geez, Matt,” Elyse says, “You got a sandwich in there somewhere, too?”

“No,” Matt says but James catches him subtly feeling his jacket as if, for half a second, he actually thought he might and Adam adds ‘FIRE’ to the list. They all start talking at once, throwing out suggestions but James tunes them out, turns to stare at Lawrence who was still busy, working away on his computer, fingers moving quickly over the keys as he tried to find something useful. He’d made a few noises at one point but James couldn’t be sure if they were pleased or disgruntled.

“I’m working on it,” Lawrence says as if he can feel James staring.

“I know,” James says, glances over to the others when he hears Adam inquire, frustrated: _where the hell do you expect us to find one of those?_ , Bruce and Elyse both replying at the same time, both saying two entirely different things but James can’t understand either of them. Lawrence asks him something but he’s only aware that it happened because he hears the last part of his voice lifting with a question mark. “Hmm? What?” Lawrence glimpses at him without moving his head.

“I asked how you were doing.”

“Well, I’ll tell you this much: I’ve felt better,” James says. “I could take over for a little while if you want.” Lawrence scoffs at him. “Hey! I mean, what’re you doing? You’re Googlin’ shit. I can do that.”

“It’s not as easy as that. Like I said to Joel: you need to know the right places to look.”

“Fine,” James concedes. “Look, I know you’ve got a million tabs open by now. At least let me read through some of them, see if there’s anything there worth our time.” He reaches over and Lawrence is still trying to type as James takes the laptop away from him, James balancing it on his right leg so Lawrence would have to work to try and get at it. He’s obviously not pleased with what’s happening but he gives in fairly quickly, sighs and scoots closer to James so he can see the screen. “Nuh-uh,” James says, turns it away from him. “You’re taking a break.” He points to his leg that didn’t have the computer on it, jams the tip of his finger against his thigh.

“What’re you doing?”

“Your head,” James says, “Right here.”

“Come on, James...” Lawrence complains, resists, but James just gestures at his leg again and he thinks that he sees Lawrence glance towards Elyse.

“She knows,” James says. _She knows I like you. She knows you like me._ “She likes you, too, dumbass,” he tells him. “Now put your head on my goddamn lap.” There’s a brief moment of hesitation and then, without another word, Lawrence does as James says. He doesn’t really know if lying down is good for him but he still doesn’t know exactly what’s wrong either and figures that, as long as he can keep Lawrence awake, it didn’t matter what position he was in. “So let’s see here…” Lawrence really did have multiple tabs, there are so many that he can’t see what they’re labeled as and, when he checks, there are two other windows open with different searches and different articles. James picks one at random. “‘ _Family of Four, Found Shot in Their Suburban Home_ ’,” he reads, scrolls through. “How is this relevant?”

“There’s a part about them receiving a ‘mysterious package’,” Lawrence says.

“It doesn’t say anything more than that? Just that it was ‘mysterious’? I doubt it has anything to do with it. ‘Suburban home’ doesn’t mean it’s not a bad neighborhood.”

“Then get rid of it! I don’t care.”

“You _do_ care,” James says, starts running his fingers through Lawrence’s hair like he had before, “But you’re in pain, you’re allowed to be grumpy. Let’s see what else you found.” He goes through ten or twelve more, deletes most of them, saves a couple that actually seemed significant and Lawrence is mumbling something about James not even finding the archived forum post on the conspiracy website he’d gotten stuck on when James is distracted by Bruce and Elyse chanting: _blow it up_ , _blow it up_ , Adam raising his voice, demanding that they:

“Shut the fuck up!”

“Uh-oh,” James says, “The kids are getting agitated.” He shouts to them: “What the hell is going on over there?” Everyone goes quiet for a few seconds before talking in normal, hushed tones again. “That’s what I thought.” James goes back to the screen, clicks around until he finds the website Lawrence had referred to before their interruption. “ _Those That Know Magazine_? How do you _find_ these people?”

“I don’t know. Just do,” Lawrence says. The page is on a black background with white font and James squints at it, hates reading anything for too long like that, makes him go cross-eyed after awhile and he’s already rubbing at his eyes after reading the first few lines. The subject of the post reads: _Friend gave me this. What is it?_ The first text box, submitted by someone called ‘VOLKOR’ has a link to what turns out to be a grainy, old cell phone photo of the cube sitting on a card table in a poorly lit kitchen. Right after it, someone calling themselves ‘billy_the_chid’ says:

_BAD NEWS. GET RID OF IT ASAP._

‘VOLKOR’ asks why.

“‘Anyone who’s ever gotten that’,” James reads Billy’s response, “‘dies shortly after if they don’t give it to someone else’. The other guy asks Billy how he knows and Billy says: ‘I had it last year, wound up in the hospital, some black truck ran me off the road. Gifted it to a nurse as a thank you for taking care of me’,” James pauses to call Billy an asshole and Lawrence laughs. “‘You’ll be safe indoors. They can’t come in unless invited. Like vampires, except this is real’. We know all this already.”

“Is there more?” Lawrence asks, obviously only having skimmed the page, and his voice is dull, the words murmured as if he’s floating around the edges of sleep and James pinches his neck. “Jesus! What the fuck!”

“Don’t fall asleep.”

“What’re you guys up to?” They hear Elyse ask as she walks over to them, drops down behind where Lawrence is lying, rests her head on James’ shoulder, drapes her arm over Lawrence, reaches for one his hands, finds one and grips hold of his pinky, wrapping her own fingers around it, taps her thumb on the knuckle on the back of his hand, acts as if she did this every day and James can feel Lawrence tense at the easiness of how she touched him but he slowly relaxes into it.

“Looking through what Lawrence found.”

“Yeah?” She lifts her head slightly, looks at James’ profile before focusing on the screen, “Anything good?” James scrolls back up to the top of the page, summarizes what he’s already read, goes back to where he left off. They all look up when the knocking gets more emphatic, one fist now joined by another, as if the people on the other side were getting really fucking tired of this game and they watch as Bruce stomps over to the door. James sees Elyse go rigid, like she sincerely thought he was going to open it but he just leans close, tells them to go fuck themselves, that they could stand there for as long as they wanted but they weren’t getting in. He slams his own fist against the door and the noise actually stops for a moment as if knocking was how they communicated and Bruce had finally said something they understood but, eventually it picks back up again and Bruce scowls before walking away, back to whatever it was he, Matt, and Adam had been doing.

The window Adam had been writing on is full now, a lengthy list of possible solutions as to how to destroy the cube, varying from the mundane to the improbable and they now seemed to be attempting to figure out how to build some of their more convoluted ideas, even though they all knew that the chances of them managing to get any of it done while still trapped in this loft were minimal at best.

“Anyway,” James says. “Where was— Right. Someone else has joined in, says that they ‘heard about this, haven’t known anyone who got it though’. How long has this thing been around? I mean, this was all written in 2010 but who knows when this Billy person got it or how this other guy got wind of it.” There’s someone else asking why they’ve never heard of this before, why nobody talks about it, and Billy tells him, succinctly:  _because everyone else is fucking dead and the ones who aren’t are too afraid to talk about it_. James doesn’t blame the people who survive for staying silent. Living meant that you gave it to someone, that you handed them a death sentence and the less you allow yourself to think about it the better; roll that guilt into a tiny ball and pack it away in a box somewhere in the very back of your mind where you can only find it if you’re sober or lying awake on a sleepless, feverish night.

He keeps scrolling and it’s a lot of arguments, a lot of back and forth, clicks to the next page and there, on one of the final posts by someone who had joined the discussion a little bit late, he sees something new, feels his mouth go dry and he clears his throat, reads it to himself.

_My family was given this box. We all touched it but my dad handled it the most. He left with it, to protect us, he said. Police found him dead in the morning. The box was gone and the men in suits never bothered my mom or my sister or me again._

He reads it again.

_My dad handled it the most._

_Found him dead._

_Never bothered us again._

He swallows, looks at his hand that’s not touching Lawrence, that hasn’t brushed up against Elyse’s knee, glances as subtly as he can to where the cube is still sitting on the floor. He’s the one who took it when they left, held it while they sat in the van, when they were in the garage, when the men were running them off the road. He carried it with them to Joel’s, didn’t put it down the entire time they were there. It was in Elyse’s backpack after that but none of them had put their fingers on it since then, either. He flexes his hand, makes a fist.

“James,” Elyse says, grabs at his attention.

“Yeah. So, uh, there’s nothing else helpful here,” he says, stupidly bookmarks the page as something bland and closes the tab, hopes he makes it sound believable, studies her face but, other than a slightly furrowed brow, she’s unreadable and anything she might have wanted to say is stopped when the other three walk over to where they’re sitting.

“Bruce wants to throw a grenade at the cube,” Adam says and James wishes that it was the strangest thing he’s heard in the past few hours.

“We’d have to go outside,” Elyse says. “Out there.” She points, like they don’t know. “I mean, I’ll go out swinging but it’s not like we’re carting around boxes of ammo.”

“How long does it take to throw a grenade?” Bruce asks. “A couple of you start shooting, hold them off, I pitch the cube in the dirt, we blow it up. Maybe it’ll work, maybe it won’t. We run back inside.” He brushes his hands off, holds them up and out towards the others, who all look at one another, hoping that someone else might come up with a decent argument as to why they shouldn’t.

 _Handled it the most_. The words are imprinted, burned into his head. _Never bothered the rest of them again_. He looks at Adam, at Bruce, at Matt. He turns to Elyse, her hair brushed over her shoulder, the bottle cap flashing in the early morning light spilling in through the scribbled permanent marker on the window, stares down at Lawrence, James’ fingers still in his hair, feels his warmth on his thigh, sees the way Elyse is still holding onto his hand.

“Let’s do it,” James says.

“Wait,” Bruce says, frowns, confused, “Really?”

“What?” James asks as if he doesn’t know what Bruce is taking an issue with.

“Just, uh, normally when I suggest something like this, you’re one of the first ones to tell me _not_ to do it,” Bruce says. “You and Adam: ‘No, Bruce, this is a bad idea, don’t rush in, don’t blow that thing up, don’t steal that helicopter, don’t release those badgers from their cage’.”

“Honestly, at this point, Bruce,” James says, “I’m giving you blanket permission to do whatever ridiculous idea comes to your beautiful brain. That being said, I’m going to do this one. You and Adam can take the door, clear whoever is on the other side. Watch out for me. I’ll bring it round the side of the building, pull a pin on a grenade. Done. Elyse and Matt can wait here with Lawrence.”

“Aw, man. Come on,” Bruce whines. “ _I_ wanted to blow it up. It was _my_ idea.”

“I’m faster than you,” James says. “I know you and Adam can hit anyone that might creep up on me. I trust you. Besides, I wouldn’t put it past you to find a way to accidentally blow me up again.”

“That’s not fair,” Bruce says. “But fine. You’ll owe me, though,” he adds.

“I’ll owe you an explosion?”

“Damn right,” Bruce says.

“Deal,” James says, and Adam and Bruce go to load up. James looks back down at Lawrence, shakes him a little. “Larr.”

“Mhm.”

“I have to get up. Here,” he says, lifts his head from his leg, urges Elyse into his place and puts his head back down in her lap instead. “There ya go. Don’t let him fall asleep,” he tells her and she salutes him sloppily, gives him a strange look when he can’t help himself and reaches over to brush a piece of her hair out of her face before putting a hand on Lawrence’s jaw to make him look at him. He wipes the blood that had finally stopped again from under his nose. “Don’t.” Just:  _don’t_.

“Hey, man,” Matt says after James stands, starts walking over to where the cube was waiting for him, “You alright?”

“Yeah,” James says, “Sure. Why?”

“Dunno. You’re acting like you’re not going to see us again.”

“I’m just worried about Lawrence,” James says, which is true, but he knows Matt well enough that he can tell he doesn’t think James is telling him everything but he isn’t going to push it either because that’s who he is or, maybe, because there just isn’t enough time.

“Alright,” Bruce says, holding his shotgun, Adam next to him with a hefty handgun but James reaches under his jacket, pulls out his gold-handled 9mm, holds it out to him and Adam glances at it, looks to James, darts his eyes back and forth a few times.

“What’re you doing?”

“It’s better.” And that’s all he says about it. Adam accepts it reluctantly, tucks the one he had been holding away, just in case, weighs James’ gun in the palm of his hand before gripping the handle, narrowing his eyes at him, looks past him to where Matt is standing but he must have simply shrugged. “Okay.” James picks up the cube, feels a tingling in the fingertips, isn’t sure if it’s because of what he’s clutching or his own barely concealed nerves. “Grenade me,” he says to Bruce, holds out an empty palm and Bruce slaps one of Elyse’s grenades down into it, gives him a second one, just in case, which James tucks into a pocket, trusts that it won’t get jostled enough for it to lose it’s pin.

“This is going to be a lot of carnage for something that might not work,” Adam says.

“Sounds like a Tuesday to me,” James replies. “Gentlemen,” he gestures to the door, the knocking, knocking, knocking, “Shall we?”

“Yes we shall,” Bruce bows but steps out ahead of James, him and Adam standing side-by-side, barrels of their guns pointed at the door where Matt has positioned himself, hand on the doorknob, off to the side, close to the wall so he’d be out of the way. “When you’re ready,” he says, meaning they’ll go whenever James says it’s okay and he doesn’t know why but he accepts it, nods but doesn’t say anything else right away. He thinks back to what he had said to Bruce all that time ago— _I worry about all of you_ —about him pulling Elyse behind him when the shooting started at the garage, about all those other times on heists or stupid jobs where he made sure that _he_ was the one in harm’s way.

If something happened to him, he’d go out with a smile, knowing that they were all still together but he’d never forgive himself if he was in a situation where he could have saved someone, could have protected one of them, but didn’t.  _These are my people. They’re my only people. If I can’t protect them, then what’s the point?_

“James,” Bruce is saying, sounds unsure and James coughs.

“Right. Sorry. Do it.”

Matt opens the door and Bruce and Adam start shooting. One body drops, then another, a third and that’s it, the men at the door are finished off before any of them had a chance to even touch fingertips to their own weapons. James starts to walk forward but Bruce holds out a hand, stops him, goes to the doorway to check outside, keeps his hand flat into the room until he’s sure and then gestures for James to come towards him and, when he does, he puts a hand on his shoulder and gives him a push.

He doesn’t see anyone else outside, no lurking figures, no black SUVs. It’s only a matter of time until more show up, he knows that, he’s not stupid, but until then he can go, do what he planned on doing and he clambers down the angular stairs, practically slides down the railing and he turns just long enough to give Bruce and Adam a thumbs up before disappearing to the large swath of dying grass around the side of the building. It’s warm, figures it’s barely past five in the morning. It’ll be a hot one but at least it won’t be humid and whatever clouds had been there around sunrise were already gone.

 _Beautiful day to die_ , he thinks, and hates how that doesn’t bother him as much as it should.

He moves closer to the back, crouches, tucks the cube under one arm, takes in a breath and pulls the pin, rolling it along the ground and then rounds the corner, pressing his back against the cold wall, covers his head just in case, listens to the rumbled explosion, listens to the thudding sound of chunks of soil kicking up into the air and landing back down to the ground below. Rising, he runs along the back wall, moves towards the chainlink fence, tosses the cube over it and spares only a single look back when he hears someone shoot, Bruce call out to him, asking if it worked, before he tries to climb as quietly as possible.

After that, it’s a few feet through a wide alley and, from there, a vacant lot, the sidewalk, and then out into the rest of the city.

 

— — —

 

He’s only walked for less than ten minutes before he takes a few seconds, ducks under the shadow of an awning, stops looking over his shoulder and actually thinks about where he’s going to go. Any other time he’d be happy to make a spectacle out of his death, go out in a blaze of glory but now, he just wants it to be over, doesn’t want to make his sacrifice into a production to be splashed onto page three or four of the daily news.

The only place he can think to go is home.

It would take almost an hour and a half, maybe more, to get there on foot and so he steps back out into the sun, leans out towards the road and sticks out a hand, waits for a taxi but it’s not until one finally pulls up to the curb that he realizes that he doesn’t have any money. He considers simply hijacking the vehicle, knows he can get it done so fast that driver probably wouldn’t even figure out what happened until he was standing on the sidewalk but that’s when he realizes that he doesn’t have a gun either. (He could take someone else’s parked car but he doesn’t have the tools and isn’t in the mood to deal with a tourist calling the cops on him.)

James gets in anyway, figures he could take his chances with being currently penniless, hopes that the man behind the wheel would believe that James was running inside the building he’ll be taking him to to get a few bills and then leave at the sound of gunfire, not willing to risk his life for thirty dollars. He gives him the address, rests the cube in the space beside him in the back and leans his forehead on the scratched window, feels the vibration as the tires roll on uneven concrete.

They’re at a particularly long stoplight when a phone starts to ring and James had forgotten about the burners that Joel had given them, had forgotten that he had taken one. He considers ignoring it, knows that hearing them try to talk him out of this was only going to make things worse and the ringing stops only to start again and the taxi driver flickers his gaze to James in the rearview mirror.

“Goddammit,” Bruce yells as soon as James picks up, “I should have known. I should have known when you gave Adam your gun— What the _hell_ do you think you’re doing? How stupid do you think we are?” He means did James really think he could pull a fast one on them, that he could just vanish and they’d run around like beheaded chickens, squawking, not sure what to do, where he went. Did they think they wouldn’t figure it out? That maybe they wouldn’t care?

“It’s—” And James isn’t sure what he’s going to say but it doesn’t matter because Bruce’s voice is being replaced by Elyse.

“James, you— Lawrence found— You know he can’t stay away from his stupid computer. He went into the history, read that post, that part about—” She can’t finish, speaks over herself, fumbles her words. She’s angry. “We said we were sticking together. You can’t do this! You have to come back. You don’t even know if what that person said was true. They could have been a troll or maybe that cube came back anyway and they’re all dead, _you don’t know_.”

“Maybe not,” James says, “But I have to try. If it keeps you all out of danger, if it saves your lives… It would be worth it.”

“No it _fucking_ wouldn’t,” she curses at him. “All those other times when you threw yourself in the line of fire for us, I hated it but I let it go because we were all there, we could get you out but we can’t do that now. You’re alone and you’re going to make a pointless sacrifice and— I love you, okay? I love you even when you’re pulling a _brainless_ stunt like this. Just come back. We’ll figure something else out.”

“I love you, too,” James says, “But I can’t. It’s my job to protect you.”

“No it’s not,” Elyse says, “It’s all of our jobs. It’s all of us protecting each other.”

“I’m sorry,” he says, and he means it. The line goes silent and he thinks that’s it, they’re done trying and he’s about to hang up, flip the phone closed when he hears Lawrence say:

“James?” He thinks about going through with it, ending the call anyway and he holds the phone away from his ear, closes his eyes, takes in a breath before pushing it back up to his face. Is this it? They’re just going to pass the phone around until someone can get through to him?

“Lawrence…”

“I can’t believe you,” he says, interrupts, sounds surprisingly lucid but James blames it on the obvious agitation, “We were finally getting somewhere, you and me and Elyse and then you just go and— You’re an asshole, James.”

“I know.”

“She’s not the only one who—” But he doesn’t say the rest. He doesn’t have to. James hears Lawrence say _take it_ to someone, the rustle of the phone being handed to another person and, this time, it’s Adam.

“I don’t think there’s anything I could possibly say to convince you to turn around and come back, is there?” He asks and James chuckles, looks out the window at the buildings going by, bounces in his seat as they drive over a pothole.

“Probably not.”

“I hope you’re happy with yourself,” Adam says and there’s a tinge of venom suddenly in his voice and it’s enough to make James wince, “Because this is going to kill them.” _It’s going to kill me_ , he doesn’t clarify.

“As long as you’re safe,” James says and he’s met with a brief pause.

“Fuck you, James,” Adam says and the line goes dead, a different, tinny sound that signaled that Adam had hung up on him. He hadn’t gotten to speak to Matt, but James figures there wasn’t much he could say either that would make him change his mind. Adam’s final three words spoke volumes, paragraphs in between each one, all of them saying how much he truly cared and, for some reason, it was those same words that hit him the hardest, but it’s still not enough for him to dramatically sit up and demand the driver _turn this taxi around_.

Twenty-five minutes or so and he’d be back where he started, only a few hours before.

He looks up at the sky, exhales, fogs up the window and thinks, once again, _sure is a beautiful day to die_.

 

— — —

 

“I’ll be real honest with you,” James says once the driver had pulled up in front of their building which, remarkably, was still both in the same condition they had left it and seemed completely abandoned—although, he wasn’t sure how long that would really last, considering the impressive response time from the men in suits—“I don’t have any money on me right now.” He’s upfront with it, readies for an argument or a fight but the man surprises him by saying:

“It’s alright. I know who you are.”

“You do?”

“A lot of people in this city do. I’m just grateful you didn’t put a gun in my face and try to steal my taxi.” James must have made some sort of face because the driver laughs. “If you’re really that concerned, remember my cab number and pay me back later.” Considering the fact that he knows James or, at least, his reputation, it’s a bold statement but James holds out his hand through the small window between the front and back seats and it takes the driver a second to realize what he’s doing before he turns more in his seat to reach through and shake his hand. “Good luck with whatever you’re doing,” he says, leaves as soon as James has stepped out and slammed the door closed.

“Home sweet home,” he says to himself, gives the place a once-over before going right to the front door. He tries to open it but it doesn’t budge. He forgot that they had locked it, had gone out through their garage. There’s a door in the back, too, but he’s pretty sure someone had locked that one as well and none of the windows were openable—not enough for him to slip through, anyway.

 _I bought one of those fake rocks with a hole in the bottom_ , he suddenly recalls Bruce saying once, laughing, on the same day that they installed their new locks, _hid a spare set of keys in it. It’s so obvious I don’t even think anyone would actually notice it_. At the time, James hadn’t been sure if Bruce was kidding or not—it was a ludicrous idea, especially in this neighborhood and even more so considering who they were now but it was also something Bruce would absolutely do—and he still didn’t know but hoped now that he hadn’t been. Dying out here was fine, he supposed, if it had to happen that way, but he preferred to be inside, to see everything one last time, have a cup of Elyse’s horrible instant coffee.

It takes a minute to find it but, when he does, he can’t believe that he hadn’t seen it before. It’s pushed up against the outside wall, only a few feet away from the door and it’s so clearly plastic that he’s surprised it hadn’t melted during their most recent, abnormally hot summer. When he picks it up, a ring of three differently-cut keys falls out of the hollow bottom onto the gravel and he scoops them up, twirls them around his index finger, nearly sends them flying into the distance.

“Of course,” he says, “Of course you really did it, Bruce.”

When he walks in, the first thing he notices is that the body that they had dragged into their space is gone and he’d been so focused on getting there, on finding the keys that he hadn’t realized the other two bodies had vanished as well, leaving nothing but bloodstains behind. They hadn’t had gotten up and walked away all on their own; James shudders that thought—he certainly _hopes_ that’s not what happened—which meant that the others that had been left alive took them away. They all looked exactly the same (or similar enough) that James wouldn’t even be able to tell if the men who had been continually tracking them down were the same ones they kept killing or new people every time. Maybe that one man had killed himself because he knew that, in the end, it wouldn’t matter, he’d just get up again in a few minutes and start over.

He puts the cube down on the coffee table amongst Lawrence’s discarded tech, the empty beer bottles, and old plans and then makes his way to the kitchen, opens a cabinet to pull down a mug, places it hard on the counter. He smiles at the jar of coffee—I LIKE INSTANT. GOOD.—and starts going through the motions of preparing himself a cup. His phone rings again but he ignores it as best he can until it’s clear that it won’t stop so, while the water boils on their junky stove, he takes it out of his pocket, holds the button on the side to turn it off. He doesn’t want to hear anything else they had to say, goes through their earlier conversation, picks out the pieces of the last things they had said to him and holds on to those instead.

_You’re acting like you’re not going to see us again._

_What the hell do you think you’re doing?_

_I love you, okay?_

_We were finally getting somewhere._

_Fuck you, James._

He’s sitting at the kitchen table, stirring old sugar with what was probably a dirty spoon into his coffee when he hears the knocking. He almost shouts for them to come in before remembering that it probably wouldn’t work so he sighs, starts drinking from his mug instead, gets two decent gulps out of it before hoisting himself from his seat and wandering over to the door.

When he opens it, there’s four men standing there but only one pulls out his gun and he waits for it but nothing happens as if the man is waiting for something, too, as if he expected to be shot and didn’t know what was taking so long. James turns his back, walks away, and he makes it to about halfway into the large area, right where the smear of blood from the first body had been left and turns to face them again, gestures at the table, towards the cube without actually looking at it.

“You know, you can just take it. I can physically give it to you if that’s what you need. I heard it works like that.” He pauses. “You don’t have to shoot me. I’m ready for it if you have to but it doesn’t have to go that way. You don’t have to do this.” He’s not trying to weasel his way out of his sacrifice ( _it’s not ‘sacrifice’_ , a voice says to him in the back of his head, _it’s suicide and you’re a coward for refusing to call it that_. He remembers Elyse: _We’re not cowards_. James supposes she was wrong); he’s been ready for it (or at least he tells himself as much) since he walked into the building or, maybe, since he first decided to do it back in the loft. Even so, he has to let them know: it doesn’t have to end with blood.

The men all look as if they’re actually considering what he’s just said. There’s a slight tilt to each of their heads as if they’re processing the information, attempting to sort out what it meant and how to respond and James expects it to be all for naught, for them to decide that yes, blood is always the answer when one of them surprises James by talking. It’s stilted, toneless, and each word is spoken as if he’d never used any sort of language before and only just learned how to use his mouth.

“We do.” They do have to, he means. A pause. “We do as we’re told. We just do as it tells us to.” James doesn’t miss the way their heads turn slightly, hidden eyes directed to a spot behind James and he follows them, it quickly and suddenly dawning on him that they’re staring at the cube.

“What—?” James starts to ask but he doesn’t get to finish, hears the gunshot before he actually feels it.

James had been shot before, more times than he could count but it didn’t make this time hurt any less. The shock of it takes him over for a few seconds and his body lurches with the punch of the bullet. He puts a hand to his side, stares down at himself, pulls his palms away to see slippery red. He leaves his own handprints on his shirt and he looks up, sees the men inviting themselves the rest of the way in, taking their time in going over to James and he tries to back away but his legs aren’t cooperating. He makes it only a couple feet before his knees give out and he lands on them hard, blinks, swallows, coughs once.

The man who had shot him steps right in front, reaches a leg up to lay a flat heel against James’ shoulder, pushes him down onto his back, flat on the grimy, cold floor. He still has his gun out and James can see the other three advancing, placid, faces blank and still, movements stiff as if they weren’t sure how to control their own bodies.

James didn’t spend too much time thinking about any sort of higher power up there amongst the clouds, didn’t really enjoy the idea of some ethereal guy up there somewhere, moving him around like a puppet. It wasn’t something he spent a lot of hours or days worrying about, unless he wanted to make himself feel bad and itchy.

He didn’t truly believe, didn’t think he did at least but, as he lay bleeding out on the floor, he was suddenly smacked with the realization that he didn’t actually want to die after all. He wanted to see Elyse and her long hair and her bottlecap necklace, to see Lawrence and his long fingers and his beat-up computer. His friends. He may not believe but he hoped that something out there believed in him because he could really use the assistance right then. He wonders if this is what people who jump from the top of buildings think as they fall.

He lifts a heavy arm, palm open towards the ceiling and waits for someone to pull the string.

There’s another gunshot and, for a moment, he thinks that he’s been hit again, that they were going to fill him with holes to make sure that there was no way he could bounce back and he waits for the agony that could only be brought by a second bullet but, instead, he hears a _thunk_ , wants to force his head to turn but he can’t move, is struggling just to keep his arm up and then there’s more gunfire, more _thud, thud, thud_. It barely lasts thirty seconds and, just as his vision is going weird around the edges, someone grabs his hand and says:

“I’ve got you.”

It’s Bruce.

He grabs his other hand around James’ arm, bends down to help heave him to his feet, allows James to use his body as support and remaining upright is a chore but he manages, takes a few steps before the room starts to spin and, suddenly, there’s another body to his left, holding him up.

“Got him,” he hears Matt say. “It’s not far.” It’s not, Matt is right, James knows it, but it _feels_ far, feels like it takes hours and, at some point, he lays his head on Bruce’s shoulder, hears him tell him that they’re almost there, keep going and then they’re moments away from bursting out into the light when he hears Adam yell:

“We’ve got company!”

They’re outside now and there’re more of them, too many to count, pouring in from everywhere like insects, a black SUV with a crumpled front end blocking the exit of a blue van that’s parked right by the front door, Elyse and Lawrence leaning out the wide space, watching. If everyone was there, who was behind the wheel? He could see a shadow there, someone in the passenger seat but his head starts going too fuzzy to think clearly anymore.

“Where’s my gun?” James hears himself ask, whispered, asks it louder as Matt, still holding him, starts firing with a single hand at the oncoming crowd and Bruce sounds like he’s going to argue, but James is getting a second wind or he’s going numb enough that it doesn’t matter and he feels a warm, heavy weight in the bloody hand of the arm draped over Bruce’s shoulders. “Alright,” he says, “Keep me standing.” Bruce moves James over to Adam, pulls an arm over him and Adam wraps one around his waist, the handgun he had put away when James had given him his gun in his right hand, Bruce now clutching his shotgun and, without another word, they start picking them off.

James isn’t sure if he’s actually hitting anyone but it doesn’t matter, bodies are dropping and they know there will be more coming but that’s not the point, they just have to thin the herd enough to be able to get away somewhat safely. He’s aware of Lawrence and Elyse firing at the crowd, too, and a bullet whistles past James’ head, slices into the side of the van and Adam shifts them, unloads an empty clip and slams in another one, helps James load his and they both aim at the same guy advancing on Matt with his own weapon drawn, get him at the exact same time, albeit in different places. Matt turns to thank them but his face shifts and he fires just past them and they hear a body fall.

“I know you’re all a little busy with your shooting and all,” Joel yells out from the driver’s side window, “But we’ve gotta do something about this car or nobody’s going anywhere, no matter how many people you kill.” James is starting to slip again, his vision going in and out and he swallows, shakes his head to try and bring himself back, even for a few brief minutes, but it’s not working. His hands are starting to sweat, he’s losing his grip on his gun, his mouth dry. There’s a moment of reprieve but there are still a few stragglers and a number of the ones they had thought were dead are starting to stand up again, ready for round two. At least that answered that question: there wasn’t an endless supply of men in suits, they just didn’t know how to stay down.

“Bruce,” James calls out, aimlessly gestures for him to come over which he does. “I think you’ll be collect—" He pauses, tries to find his words through the fuzz, "You'll be collecting on that explosion I owe you a little earlier than you thought.” Despite the situation, despite the current condition James was in, Bruce’s eyes light up. James tries to get into his pocket with the hand not hanging over Adam’s shoulders, fumbles and Adam reaches over to take his weapon, tucks his own under his arm, uses it to shoot at someone who was getting too close and James grasps, finally, at the second grenade that Bruce had given him. He leaves blood on it when he hands it over and Bruce takes it, smiles.

“And then we blow them all away,” he says, walks over towards the front of the van and it’s one of the slower ones, the one that gives whomever you’re throwing it at a moment to realize what’s just landed at their feet before it goes off. Bruce holds his shotgun like a baseball bat, pulls the pin, tosses the grenade up in the air and slams the barrel of the gun into it and they all watch—even the men in suits, their ambling halted by the display—as it lands in the divot between the hood and the windshield of the SUV.

There’s three seconds of silence and then the car explodes.

Pieces of metal go flying from the fire, a particularly lethal looking piece landing with a satisfying _thunk_ on two of the men. It didn’t exactly _move_ the vehicle from out of the way but it definitely cleared enough room for them to get through and Adam finally leads James towards the open door of the van. Either the men left standing didn’t care anymore or this chaos was far too confusing because they aren’t advancing, aren’t shooting either, are simply stuck where they had died, standing with arms at their sides. _This is what happens_ , James thinks at them, _when to go up against people who can fight back._ Whoever—or _what_ ever; he can’t forget how they stared at the cube, wants to tell the others but the words won’t come out—is telling them what to do obviously didn’t prepare them for this.

Hands, so many hands help him inside and he’s brought to the empty space in the back. There aren’t any seats, just a flat, metal floor and someone slams the door shut, filling the space with darkness, the light spilling in from the windshield and small window in the back door the only dim illumination.

“Everyone in? Everyone here?” Joel asks from the front.

“Looks like it,” an unfamiliar voice beside him answers, a shadowed head wearing a baseball cap glancing back over his seat. James is lying down, his head resting on someone’s legs, a hand resting on his forehead and he turns his neck, looks to see Elyse staring down at him, eyes wet, and he can feel the van start to move. He’s warm, doesn’t feel the chill of a metal floor underneath him and he realizes that the rest of his body is lying on someone, too, not just the top half of him. A hand he knows rests on his leg, squeezes.

“Lawrence,” he manages weakly, guesses.

“I’m here,” He says, squeezes again.

“Elyse,” he tries to say next and he thinks he can see her shake her head.

“Don’t say anything, okay? God, you have no idea how pissed off I am at you right now.” Her necklace is dangling just a few inches over his chin and he reaches up unsteadily to grab at it, rubs his thumb over the ridges but he barely feels it against his skin.

“Orange soda,” he says, thinks he means to say something else but it doesn’t matter, really, because, after that, everything goes black.

 

— — —

 

He wakes up to the sound of beeping, of the soft murmuring of daily life ebbing and flowing just outside of where he’s lying, a sterile, sour smell creeping into his nose and knows he’s in a hospital before he even attempts to open his eyes. His mouth is bone dry and he blinks against the light, against the bright white and pale blues of his room and he lets out a slow breath, twitches his fingers against a scratchy blanket draped over him.

“Oh my god,” he hears Elyse say, sees movement of a body standing up from what must have been a chair. He jumps when someone grabs his hand and she must mistake the jolt for pain because she apologizes and he wearily lifts his other arm, slaps himself in the face trying to rub focus back into his eyes. When he manages to move his arm away he can see her more clearly now, still wearing the same thing she had been, the hem of her shirt dark red from what he knew was his blood. She tells him to wait as if she expects him to go somewhere and, as she leaves, he can see that at least she had been given the bottom half of a pair of scrubs and he wonders how much of his own blood he had left behind on her jeans that she had to take them off and then wonders how long he had been here for since it was clear that she hadn’t left the building since they must have brought him here.

An older man with a neat, grey haircut and a white coat comes in first, Elyse after and then four other bodies pack into the doorway, blocking the light spilling in from the hallway and the doctor chastises them but, eventually, lets it go when it’s clear that they weren’t going to leave. He asks James a series of questions that he answers hoarsely and immediately forgets as soon as it’s all over; he’s poked, a tiny light flashed in his eyes, a cup with a straw presented to him and he drinks the entire thing with almost one breath.

“You’re a lucky man,” he says when James finishes, sits back against his pillow but doesn’t say anymore. “You look tired. You should get some rest. Your friends can fill you in once you wake up.”

 _I’ve been asleep for God know’s how long_ , he thinks, _how can I be so tired? I just woke up_.

But he is, somehow, and he closes his eyes again to the sound of his friends all talking at once.

 

— — —

 

He can’t tell the time of day when he wakes up the second time nor the third and, by the fourth, he has no idea if only a few hours had passed or a few days.

There’s a different person in his room each time but, by the fifth, it’s Elyse again and she helps him sit up when he asks, gives him his cup and straw and he’s able to drink from it on his own. He wiggles his toes, moves his legs, his arms, and feels relief wash over him.

“What happened?” He asks, finally, and she narrows her eyes at him.

“I told you already,” she says, “You don’t remember?” He shakes his head, shifts, feels the IV pull against his arm, his side spasming with pain and he flinches, puts a hand to it, bites down on the inside of his cheek. “You asked the second time you woke up. Guess those painkillers did a bit of a number on ya’,” she says, taps a finger on the side of his head and she’s smiling but it quickly fades. “You almost died,” she says, suddenly incredibly serious and her cheeks flush with anger and residual fear. “You were pretty much _dead_ , James, do you get that? I watched— _We_ watched you—” Her hands are shaking when she reaches onto the bed to grasp his own between them. “They managed to bring you back but— You were out for three days, not counting the two you were in and out.” Five days? He’d been here for five days.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“I’m sure you are.”

“Where are the others?” James asks and Elyse shrugs a shoulder even though she winds up giving him a relatively clear answer.

“Bruce and Adam have been wandering the building, keeping an eye on the doors. Guard dogs. Matt’s camped out in the waiting room. Joel stops by now and then but he won’t stay. Lawrence… I’m not sure where he is.”

“Here,” Lawrence says, his voice coming from the doorway and he walks in, goes immediately to the other side of the bed but then freezes as if he had planned on doing something but changed his mind at the last second, hovers there, staring down at James, not saying anything.

“I’ll go tell everyone you’re up,” Elyse says, lets go of James’ hand and reaches over him, folds her fingers into a fist and Lawrence does the same with his own, bumps it with Elyse’s and then she leaves.

“What the heck was that?” James asks but Lawrence just shakes his head.

“It’s a thing now,” he says. “I guess.” James moves over as best he can, makes some extra room beside him and pats the space and, unlike when he tried to get Lawrence to rest his head on his leg back at their old loft, this time he doesn’t hesitate, climbs onto the bed, ankles crossed, and puts his head on James’ pillow, shares it with him, looks up at the ceiling.

“How’s your head,” James asks, turns his head to look at Lawrence at the same time he turns his own to stare at James.

“Just a really bad concussion,” Lawrence says. “I’ll be fine. They gave me the good stuff. I’m feeling a little weird right now, just so you know.” James laughs.

“That’s why it was so easy to get you in bed, huh?” James asks.

“Yeah, well.” He turns his face back towards the ceiling. “Don’t do that again.”

“Do what?” James asks, even though he knows what Lawrence is referring to.

“Die,” he says the word, whispers it, folds his hands on his chest and and clutches them together so tightly that his knuckles go white. James picks up his hand, folds it over Lawrence’s and his tension eases, just slightly.

“I can’t make any promises but I’ll do my best,” he says. They’re quiet for a minute or so until Lawrence asks:

“This… thing with you and me and Elyse. It’s weird, right? It’s sort of weird.”

“Yeah,” James says, “Probably. Our whole lives are weird, though. What’s a little more of that gonna hurt?” There’s a cube-shaped elephant in the room and, so far, they’ve done a fair enough job of ignoring it but, once everyone is crowded into the small space, it’s difficult to avoid. (They all walk in, one at a time, react to seeing him really, truly awake in their own different ways: Bruce hugs him awkwardly, too roughly, but James doesn’t have it in him to complain, Matt nods in his direction, clasps his hand for a moment, and Adam surprises James by standing by the bed, leaning over and touching his forehead against James’ and James grabs the back of his neck, holds him there for a couple seconds.)

“We’ve been keeping an eye out the entire time,” Adam says, “But we haven’t seen them.”

“Haven’t seen the cube either,” Bruce adds.

“I guess that post was right after all,” Elyse says from where she’s sitting on the bed. “Whoever handled it the most. It imprinted on you or something.”

“And, I guess, technically, you _did_ die, sort of,” Lawrence says. “Which is what they wanted in the first place. It must have been long enough for the cube to find someone else to latch onto or they just couldn’t tell the difference. Or they’re scared of us,” he adds and Bruce grins. _As they should be_ , the expression says. There’s a brief, companionable silence and then James asks:

“Now what?” He watches as the five of them exchange a series of looks before all eyes settle on Elyse, who sighs.

“We talked about that and… Remember that night on your balcony, when we were running shit jobs? Even before we met these guys,” she says, gestures to the room. “You said that you didn’t want to be doing this sort of thing forever, that you always felt like we were here to do something different, something better.”

“I vaguely remember that,” James says and Elyse looks to the others again before continuing, even though James feels as if he already knows where this is going. He _did_ remember, quite clearly in fact, and at the time—and for awhile after—he had been embarrassed about it, had hoped that Elyse was drunk enough that she wouldn’t but here was was, years, later, repeating almost every word back to him.  

“That cube is still out there, it’s still going to fuck people over. It’s like Joel said: we’re stubborn, persistent assholes but, we’re stubborn, persistent assholes who have a better chance than most at destroying that thing.”

“Or, at least,” Matt says, “Figuring out where it came from.” James glances at Adam, who shrugs.

“I’m for it. I don’t have any other plans.”

“And you owe me another explosion,” Bruce says to James, doesn’t explain why, “I want it and I won’t get it if we hang around here.”

“Hey,” Lawrence says when James looks to him, “I go where you go.”

“I like it,” James says after considering it for a moment. It was more dangerous, would take them away from home, and there was no guarantee that they’d ever really find answers or that, in the end, it would even matter if they did but, somehow it seemed like a step up from heists and stealing cars and being blown out of convenience store windows from his friend trying to blow open an impenetrable safe. These people have already killed him once and James was never one to shy away from some good, old fashioned revenge. “So,” he says, stretches his arms out, “Where do we start?”


	2. Epilogue.

_TWO WEEKS LATER_

 

“Hey!” Bruce says, bangs an open palm on James’ door. When he had come back, he’d found that someone had installed a new one onto his open doorway, had done a terrible job of it—there’s too wide a gap between the door itself and the floor, the wood cut sloppily, crooked—but at least they had tried. Lawrence groans, buries his face deeper into his pillow, shifts, moves James’ arm from where it’s draped over his stomach and Elyse, closest to door, reaches to the floor, grabs the nearest hard object and throws it. “Okay,” Bruce says after a second, unperturbed, “Fifteen minutes and then we’re outta here.”

“I thought we were leaving tomorrow,” Elyse complains, lifts her head to look at the clock on a nearby table. “What time is— Eugh.” She grunts puts her head back down, kicks her heel into Lawrence’s leg, gets a hand pushing at the back of her head in response.

“Stop,” James says, presses his forehead between Lawrence’s shoulder blades. His side is still tender, the hole both somehow itchy and numb at the same time and walking still wasn’t the easiest thing to do. They’d gone on one more job before closing up shop, clearing their accounts, but he’d been left behind in the car to keep an eye on things, didn’t even get to drive, Lawrence taking over for what his usual role was and he had to listen as they worked together, planned, shifted, slipped through doors while he drummed his fingers on the dashboard. _That’s what you get_ , Adam had said, _for almost dying on us_. He’s like a health class-assigned sack of flour disguised as a baby.

Elyse had been right: they had collected information, Lawrence spending hours combing through the internet, searching and scrounging for bits and pieces, anything they could find about the cube, or something that might have been related. He’d even managed to track down ‘billy_the_chid’ who had posted on that forum some six-odd years ago and he’d agreed to meet with them. It was going to be their first stop, only a six hour drive away from where they were, but they weren’t supposed to leave until tomorrow. Something must have changed.

He still hadn’t told any of them about when the man in the suit had spoken to him, to the turn of their heads when they looked at the cube as they had said: _We do as we’re told. We just do as it tells us to_. He almost tells Lawrence on the first night after his painkillers run out when he can drink again but he stops himself before he says anything, plays it off as him forgetting what he was going to say. He’s not sure why he hasn’t mentioned it. Maybe because there’s still a part of himself that refuses to believe that a seemingly inanimate object could be giving orders to what appeared to be humans. Whatever his reason, he knew they’d find out eventually and he also knew he had to be the one to tell them or they’d never forgive him for keeping that to himself for so long.

“Let’s get going before he comes in here and drags us out by our ankles,” James says, rolls over, feet thudding against the floor. Lawrence grumbles and Elyse kicks at him again but when he reaches for her, she’s not there, already out of bed, too, stretching and James turns, puts one knee on the mattress and leans over him. “Get up.”

“Alright, alright,” Lawrence says, moves James’ face away without looking, pushes at the side of his head with the back of his hand.

 

— — —

 

Everyone else is already up by the time the three of them make their way down the stairs, twenty-five minutes later instead of the fifteen that Bruce had given them, but he doesn’t look particularly bothered by their apparent lateness, is zipping up a large and heavy bag that’s sitting on the couch. Matt’s in the kitchen, at the table with a mug of instant coffee, unused mugs waiting to be filled from a pot on low heat resting on the stove and Adam’s in his chair staring at the television but doesn’t appear to be watching anything but his own reflection.

None of that is particularly out of the ordinary. What _is_ strange, is the fact that Matt isn’t sitting alone at the table.

“Joel?” Elyse asks, as though she has to make sure it’s really him and he smiles, waves once, and James blinks at him before turning to stare at Bruce, who shrugs, not because he doesn’t know why he’s here either but because it’s not his story to tell. _Don’t look at me. Ask him_.

“You got me into this mess,” Joel says, stands to pour coffee out for Elyse but doesn’t do the same for Lawrence, makes him do it himself but it’s not out of malice, it’s just what they do. “I try to get out and they pull me back in,” he continues, reaches his arms out and then yanks them back towards his body, elbows pushed against his sides. “Besides, you’re using my van. I’m not letting you run off without me in it. It’ll be in pieces the next time I see it, if I ever see it again at all.” He hesitates, sighs dramatically as if they had called him out on something. “Okay, you got me. It’s not really my van. But Spoole’ll kill me if I give it away and it doesn’t come back in pristine condition.” Nobody asks who ‘Spoole’ is and James guesses—hopefully correctly—that it must have been the baseball hat that was sitting next to Joel when they came to his rescue those two-or-so weeks ago.

“It’s okay,” Adam says from where he’s still sitting, “You can just say that you missed us.”

“Never,” Joel says. “I will _never_ admit that.”

“Well, we missed you,” Bruce says, walking over to him and wrapping his arm around his neck, giving him a friendly enough shake that the lukewarm coffee in his mug splashed out over the rim, flecking onto the table.

“Speak for yourself,” Lawrence says with a smile.

“So what’s going on?” James asks. “Why’re we leaving today? What’s the rush?”

“That guy we’re going to meet,” Adam says. “He called this morning while you were sleeping and since I was the only one up…” Lawrence wasn’t the only one who had trouble sleeping, James knew that, but Adam rarely got himself out of his room when he was suffering through insomnia, holed himself up in the dark to wait it out, hoping that he’d either fall asleep at some point or could come shuffling out once the sun came up. Unlike Lawrence, though, James rarely knew why he had such problems getting sleep, had tried to ask once or twice; sometimes it was because of how they had messed up during a job (or how they might mess up in the future) and, other times, he couldn’t give him a clear answer. The only ones out of the six—now seven again—of them that seemed to sleep were Bruce and Matt but, even then, he couldn’t be sure. “He wouldn’t give me specifics but he said it was urgent. Said if we were really serious about what we were doing, there was something we’d want to see. I think he sent Lawrence something but I didn’t check.”

Lawrence goes over to the couch where he had left his computer and flops down on the under-stuffed cushions, clears room on the low table to put it down and after some typing, some clicking he makes a noise.

“Here we go,” he says, bends closer to the screen to read it, chews on his bottom lip. “About four hours from here… just a bit out of our way but not terrible. A thirty-year-old…” He trails off. “Shit. Set his house on fire. It’s not in the article but Billy says the guy was rambling about men in suits trying to kill him. Said he trapped some in the house when he lit it up but when the police went in to check they couldn’t find any bodies.” He looks up, stares at everyone individually. “Sounds like our cube.”

“When did this happen?” Matt asks and Lawrence reads, glances at him.

“Two days ago. Guy’s still alive.”

“We know where it’s been,” James says, “Still doesn’t tell us where it’s going.”

“He didn’t give it away,” Elyse says, takes a sip from her mug, “And he’s not dead. So he must still have it. Or someone around there does.”

“At the very least, we’ll have someone to talk to,” Joel says.

“If we can get to him,” Adam adds.

“So, like he said:” Bruce says. “Urgent.” He claps his hands together. “I’d say ‘we’ve got a plane to catch’ but, well, we don’t. Either way…” He stretches out his arm, hand flat, points to the door.

“Who put you in charge?” Joel asks. “I thought James was our fearless leader.”

“Me?!” James blurts out. “Since when?”

“I don’t know,” Joel shrugs, “I just sort of assumed.”

“I don’t remember voting on that,” Lawrence says. “Although I guess I wouldn’t be totally pissed off if he was.”

“I’m flattered, truly, but there’re no leaders, alright?” James says. “As a wise woman once told me: ‘It’s all of our jobs. It’s all of us protecting each other’. Cheesy as hell but she had a point.”

“Smart woman,” Elyse says.

“Yeah,” James replies, “I’d love to meet her again someday.” That earns him a smack to the arm but he takes it with a smile and the movement jangles the bottlecap hanging around her neck.

“Are we getting out of here or what?” Lawrence says, standing and closing his computer again. “Because if we are, I think I need a few more things. Hang on.” Everyone groans when he disappears back upstairs because they know he’s going to try and bring as much of his tech as possible, justify it as a necessity and, while he’s gone, the rest of them start to collect the packed bags and carry them out to the dark blue van that was waiting for them in their garage.

They’re acting like they don’t expect to come back again and, for the first time, James doesn’t particularly mind the idea.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I realized while I was finishing this how similar it was to the way Entropy ended (believe it or not, it was even more blatantly obvious how similar they were before I went and fixed it). I didn’t do that on purpose, it just happened to work out that way. I guess I’m just a sucker for ‘and the adventure continues’ endings.


End file.
